


To Break Nature's Rule

by Quakey



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Feeeelings, Hurt/Comfort, Inhumans - Freeform, Plotfic, Slow Burn, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3117572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quakey/pseuds/Quakey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With her newly-awakened powers, Skye doesn't dare go back to SHIELD for fear of hurting the people she loves. Good thing she doesn't care about Ward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a short chapter to get things rolling! This fic takes place immediately after 2x10 and will involve both comics canon and speculation for future events on the show, though I'll be taking crazy creative liberties with each. It will also, eventually, be Skyeward, though there's a lot of road to cover before they stop kidnapping and shooting each other. Ah, love.

She couldn't touch Trip.

It's the thought that haunts her all the way through the tunnels, all the way through the crumbling rocks that once made up a city. At least half the place has caved in, and every step sends dust flying, but her mind is a million miles from the destruction.

She couldn't touch Trip. The pile of ashes that he became. She should have checked - she could've gathered up the ashes, maybe, and done - done _something_ \- maybe even made sure he was dead and not just - just -

Skye stops suddenly, leaning against a broken pillar and breathing in deep, dizzying gasps. She can't seem to get enough air. The whole temple feels like it's buzzing, everything from the walls around her to the pebbles beneath her feet, and she wishes they would be still for a minute, just long enough to make sense of what the hell is happening to her.

Because something _is_ happening. She can feel it. There's an awareness to her now, an energy underneath her skin. She feels every part of her body from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. She feels like she's _vibrating_.

It's exhilarating.

It scares the hell out of her.

"Coulson?" she yells, stumbling her way into a shaft of light. She can see a patch of blue from the sky above her, which must mean the entire building has crumbled, and that means LEOs and EMTs are about to swarm the scene like ants. Fuck. She needs to get out of here, and fast, before the locals come to gawk. Where is everyone? Did the team make it out?

Oh, God, _did the team make it out?_

Skye takes a deep breath, ignoring the way the oxygen practically sings as it travels through her bloodstream, lighting up her nerves and her veins and everything else.

"Coulson?" she tries again. "May? Can anyone hear me?"

There's a sudden noise from the shadows. She whirls around, hand dropping to where she usually keeps her sidearm, but of course her gun isn't there when she actually needs it. She doesn't have a flashlight, either. There are bad days, and then there are bad days for SHIELD agents.

"Who's there?" she demands loudly, hoping volume makes up for courage. The thought occurs to her that it could be father, that he might have come back for her, and she's torn by a half-wild longing so intense that she almost misses a flash of yellow from the darkness.

It's an eye. An eye and a crouched form, still hidden in the shadows, covered in something that looks like quills or needles.

For a second, Skye can only stare.

Then she makes herself say, "Raina?"

Raina doesn't respond with words, but at the sound of her name she emits a long, high wailing noise, something that makes the hair on Skye's arms stand straight up. Then she turns, still wailing, and bolts around a pillar with a _skit-skit-skit_ noise until she's gone.

A tail whips around the corner after her.

Skye swallows hard. Her heart is pounding and her skin is on fire, but it doesn't hurt; it's more like waves of warmth emitting from her insides and lapping up and down her body. She can feel _everything_ in the tunnel, every rock and every cranny, and the sunlight is still streaming down from the hole in the ceiling and it feels absolutely _amazing_ , and -

Enough. She has to get out of this place. She has to reconnect with her team, and she has to report that the obelisk has been destroyed, and she has to tell them about Raina and Trip and everything else that's happened.

Skye looks at the wall in front of her.

_Did the team make it out?_

Somehow, instinctively, she knows which parts of the rubble will support her weight.

_Did her father make it out?_

Skye puts her hands on the wall and starts to climb.

_Did Ward?_

*

By the time she emerges from the hole, panting and streaked with dirt, the surrounding area is crawling with cop cars and ambulances. No one can see her among the debris, but it's only a matter of time, so Skye quickly hauls herself up and into a crouch. There's still no sign of SHIELD, and the worry is almost enough to bring her to her knees right there in the middle of a disaster zone, because what if they were caught in the collapse? Trip followed her. What if the others did too? What if they were right behind him before the temple walls sealed them in? What if their corpses are already rotting down there?

Blood surges through her body, making her feel hyper-aware and almost buoyant.

A group of medics bustle by, and Skye uses them for cover to escape the scene. First things first: she needs to disguise herself. She's sweaty, dirty and her hair is a mess, so she'll stick out like a sore thumb among the locals. SHIELD protocol six for disastrous missions: _Do not draw attention to agency actions or operatives even when waiting for extraction._

A disguise first, Skye tells herself, and then she'll swipe someone's cellphone and get in touch with the team. And everything will be okay. No sweat.

Hustling through the crowd and then veering away from it, she gets incredibly lucky down a paved side street leading into the greater San Juan area. Someone has left their jacket on the back of a chair at an outdoor cafe, and she lifts it easily, _not_ looking around in guilt and nervousness like she would've done just six months ago. This time she picks it up without breaking stride, one hand smoothing out her hair and obscuring her face from the people inside the windows. No one calls after her. No one notices her at all.

 _I can be ninja_ , she'd told May once, who'd responded with a perfectly sculpted eyebrow raise that said _you are an infant_.

God, if she got May killed -

No. No. Everything will be fine.

She snags a hat from a street vendor two blocks away, and a cellphone a few blocks after that, staggering the thefts as an extra precaution. She wishes desperately for a gun but no one's stance says they're packing. She starts punching in Coulson's number by memory as she hurries down the street, and it suddenly occurs to her that she's moving _faster_ than usual, not just running-from-the-scene-of-the-crime fast but inhumanly so, quickly enough that heads are turning in curiosity as she passes.

She forces herself to slow down. It seems harder than it should be, like her body wants to keep flying, keep testing its limits. She gives a tight, not-at-all-reassuring smile to a woman staring at her and clutching her groceries.

Then the woman's eyes move to something behind her, and panic explodes in Skye's stomach.

" _¡Alto!_ " a police officer barks.

He's a large, heavyset man with a moustache. He grips her upper arm so hard it's painful. He looks at her with suspicion and distrust.

All of this goes through Skye's brain in a matter of seconds, and then the street explodes.

Screams erupt from all sides. Chunks of asphalt go flying into the air. The ground _heaves_ , moving up and down as though taking a big breath, and then people are yelling in frantic Spanish, the words _no!_ and _dios Mio!_ and _help, help!_ mixing interchangeably with _diablo_.

There are bodies on the ground, dozens of them.

Skye knows this because she's standing in the eye of the storm, perfectly unhurt, watching wide-eyed as the moustached police officer looks at her with confusion and blood pouring out of his mouth. It only takes a few moments for him to die, but Skye knows the exact second he does, because she can feel the vibrations of his brain and heart and lungs and she can feel them all fall gently still.

Her blood sings.

Her stomach lurches.

Before anyone can notice her, she turns and runs from the chaos, eyes blinded by tears. In her hand, Coulson says "Hello? Hello?" until she crushes the phone like tissue paper, her sobs just loud enough to mask him saying, "Sk- ?"


	2. Chapter 2

Eight dead. Twelve more injured.

Skye sits on the bed, knees pulled up to her chin, and watches the news as it flickers across the cheap motel TV. Her Spanish is terrible, but she understands the numbers well enough, and she understands what it means when they keep ticking upwards on the bottom of the screen.

They're calling it an earthquake. Skye knows better.

When she can't stand the reports anymore, she takes a shower. Every drop of water is a vibration that hits her skin like electricity. It feels _good_ , it feels like the water is poking her and saying _hello, hello, let's play_ , like she could take every drop and turn it into a flood or a thunderstorm or a cataclysmic collision.

She climbs out of the shower after that.

The cellphone is long gone, but as she sits on the bed, dripping onto the covers, the muted television showing horror after horror, she finds herself staring at the old-school landline sitting on the dresser. She should call. She wants to call. She still doesn't know what happened to the team.

The only problem is that she thinks _I should make sure they're safe_ and what really goes through her mind is _I should make sure I haven't killed them_. She thinks _I don't know what I am anymore_ and imagines dead villagers in China and dead strangers in Puerto Rico, and a little voice inside her whispers _you've always known_.

Her stomach in knots, she grabs the phone and dials Coulson's number before she can change her mind. He picks up on the third ring, long enough to note and consider the strange number, but she doesn't know if he's suspicious enough to start a trace right away. Maybe he is. Maybe she wants to be found. Maybe she wants him to swoop in and tell her everything's going to be okay.

Maybe she's just weak.

"It's me," she says anyway, watching droplets from her hair make soft plops on the comforter.

Coulson pauses for just a heartbeat, and then he says, completely calm, "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls - "

" - it's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world," Skye finishes.

Their safety codes used to be random strings of mutually-agreed numbers. Skye had been the one to insist on an upgrade. She and Coulson have song lyrics; Simmons makes Fitz sing some weird doo-wee-oo noise. Ward had refused any protocol so undignified. In response, Skye had given him binary: 01101100 01101111 01110011 01100101 01110010.

These memories seem like a lifetime ago.

"Good to hear your voice," Coulson is saying now, sounding both tense and relieved. There are noises in the background, but she can't make out who else is there or what's happening. "Where are you? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she lies, and decides to rip the band-aid right off. "What about the team?"

"Present and accounted for."

Relief surges through her body, making her feel dizzy. "Everyone?" she asks, just to make sure.

"Triplett hasn't reported back," Coulson says, and just like that, her relief vanishes and an invisible hand squeezes her heart. "But everyone else is here. Now answer my question, Skye, and honestly, please."

Fuck.

"I need to tell you something," Skye says, her words only quavering the smallest bit at the end.

"I'm listening."

"It's about Trip."

There's a long, long silence on the other end of the line. When Coulson speaks, however, his voice is steady. "How?"

"There was this chamber," Skye says, and she can feel her voice cracking, but if she doesn't get it out now then she never will. She tells him about everything - the chamber, the obelisk, the light, the encasement of their bodies. She even explains the feeling that came over her when the cocoon started cracking, when it felt like someone was ripping off a tight, constrictive bandage that she hadn't even known she was wearing.

What she doesn't mention is the way she said _Trip_ , the way she'd looked into his eyes while the cocoon was slithering up her neck, and how she isn't sure anymore if she had been begging for his help or commanding her powers to take him instead.

"All right," Coulson says heavily, when she finishes her story. "I'll make arrangements. He won't be the first SHIELD operative to be buried without a body."

"I'm sorry," Skye says, staring at her knees, thinking of how those two words are the most inadequate in the entire human language.

"It wasn't your fault," Coulson says, and when she doesn't reply, he repeats, "Skye, it wasn't your fault. You know that, right? Trip understood the risks of the mission just as much as you did."

_But I said his name_ , Skye doesn't reply. Instead she hears herself asking, "Did you see the news?"

A pause from the other end of the line. "I see a lot of news."

"About the _earthquake_ ," Skye presses.

Another pause.

"We had to maneuver around it," Coulson says, voice even. "We assumed it wasn't a natural phenomenon, but we weren't sure what had happened there. Do you know something about it, Skye?"

She looks down. There are wet splotches on her comforter. "I did it."

She hears Coulson take a breath. It isn't a huge, dramatic one, more like a small inhale than anything else, but it makes her clench the phone so tightly that it actually cracks. When she realizes what she's doing - when she remembers the last phone she crushed to dust without even trying - she drops the receiver like it burns. She can't even hold a phone without destroying it. She doesn't know her own body anymore.

"-kye?" Coulson is asking, voice tinny. "What's going on? Give me your location. I'm coming to get you."

"No!" she says instantly, scooping the phone back up and pressing it to her ear. "No, don't come anywhere _near_ me."

"Skye - "

"I created an _earthquake!_ " she cries, and suddenly she's on her feet, hair swinging everywhere and splattering drops all over the wall, little bits of kinetic energy that she could turn into a million separate disasters. She can feel the power within her, power that's practically begging to be used, and it makes her feel like doing something crazy, like clawing at her own throat until the lump and the shame and the horror finally go away. "I did that, Coulson. I killed all those people."

"That wasn't you - "

"It was," she insists, and then she's crying, stupid little hiccups echoing down the line. "I'm a monster, Coulson. I'm some kind of weird freak _alien_ ," she bites the word off, "and now I'm running around killing innocent people just like my father - "

"You are not your father," Coulson says firmly, and he sounds so sure about it that her heart might actually break. "You've been through a trauma, that's all. You're upset."

"I'm out of control."

"We can fix that."

"Yeah?" Skye asks. "Would you say that to anyone else? Or would they be black-bagged and taken to the Fridge or the Icebox or the, the - " She struggles to find a name for some other sinisterly-named SHIELD facility, but Coulson doesn't give her the chance to finish her thought.

"They would not," he says. "Not unless they proved themselves to be a clear and malicious threat to the public, which you aren't. Skye, I don't know how to explain what happened down there, but I know _you_. You're a good agent. A good person. Whatever happened, whatever lives may have been lost, you aren't going to solve your problems or do right by the victims by running away."

He sounds like he always does, steady and reasonable, and his words are so very tempting to believe. Coulson would forgive her even after hearing the gory details of the earthquake. Skye knows this like the back of her hand. He might have to take precautions to ensure the safety of the team; he might not even let her back on the quinjet when her powers are so volatile. But he wouldn't turn her away. He wouldn't judge her for what happened. She knows exactly what he would say if she grabbed him and hugged him and buried her face in his shoulder: _it's all right, Skye_. Or maybe _we just have to figure this out, Skye_.

But her name isn't Skye.

And when she imagines Coulson hugging her back, she imagines blood bursting from his lips as his eyes widen and his heart stops.

"I'm leaving," she says. Her eyes are red and her voice is thick, but her words are definite. "I'm leaving SHIELD. Effective immediately. I quit."

"Don't make this decision now," Coulson says, after a pregnant pause. "Things are still crazy on the ground, I know. You need some time to acclimate. Fitzsimmons have been running all kinds of diagnostics to track the energy surges in the city, if you'd like to help - " he starts, but Skye isn't listening anymore.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I can't put you in danger. Any of you. I - "

_I wouldn't be able to live with myself_ , she almost says, but she isn't sure how she's going to go on living with herself regardless.

She settles for, "Don't try to find me," and then "Please, Coulson. I mean it. Don't."

And she hangs up the cheap motel phone.

She stays like that for awhile, standing in the middle of the room and staring at nothing.

The death toll on the screen climbs to nine.

*

She eventually has to leave the room for food, though part of her still feels too guilty to eat. She knows it's stupid, but she felt the same way after killing Donnie, when the reports had been filed and the guns had been put away and she had been sitting in the base kitchen eating lunch. The total banality of it had abruptly struck her as ludicrous. She had killed someone. She had taken a life. And there she was eating a sandwich.

She's killed more people than she can count, now. Donnie. The HYDRA agent she touched with the obelisk.

Trip.

The police officer.

A six-year-old girl who had been standing on the wrong side of the street when it blew up.

Maybe even Ward.

She isn't positive she killed him, but she shot him four times and left him to die, so it's probably a good guess. She doesn't know how she feels about it. She remembers his face, the pure shock of it, and the way his body had fallen to the ground. She doesn't remember what she said afterwards. Adrenaline had been pumping too furiously to make sense of anything.

These are the thoughts on her mind when she turns a corner, hands in her pockets, and runs right into him.

For a minute they just stare at each other, wrong-footed and caught off-guard. Skye's training kicks in on autopilot; she takes in the haggard look, the bags under his eyes and the unshaved stubble on his chin. She notices the way he's leaning slightly to the right, presumably because there are bullet holes pulling at his skin underneath his jacket.

She remembers _that_ feeling quite well, and it prompts her to speak without even thinking about it.

"Guess I needed more ammo."

Ward doesn't quite smile, but he looks, of all things, pleased to see her. "It takes more than a few rounds to finish me."

"Gonna take me hostage again?" she asks. Her eyes scan the crowd behind him, looking for any familiar faces, enemy or otherwise. There are a few storefronts that could be used for cover if it comes to that.

"I never took you hostage," Ward replies, with that patient, put-upon tone he uses when he is _blatantly lying_ , and it makes her so angry it actually sparks the particles in the air between them. He can't see it, but Skye does, and for the first time since she emerged from an alien cocoon like a movie monster, she's actually glad to have powers. Her fury is roiling under her skin, ready and waiting for her call. If four bullets aren't enough to put him out of his misery, maybe something a little different can do the trick.

"Get out of my way," she says, feeling the energy charge within her. "First and only warning."

"Or you'll shoot me again?"

"Or this time I'll aim at your head."

Ward's eyes briefly sweep over her. She doesn't have a gun, but he can't be sure of that.

Then he asks, "Why didn't you aim at my head before?"

Center mass, Skye wants to say, because that's what she'd been taught. Ward had been the one to do it. _You can't just shoot a weapon out of the bad guy's hand like they do in the movies_ , he'd told her, back when he was still her S.O. _Incoming agents are always trained to go for center mass unless they're positive they can make a headshot. Torsos are much bigger and easier targets, anyway._

The problem is that Skye had been only feet from Ward. She hadn't needed a big and easy target. A headshot would've been a cinch.

She doesn't know why she didn't take it.

She also hadn't realized, before this moment, that she'd shot him with the same techniques he'd taught her.

"All right, you got me," she says, too pissed off to keep playing his game. "I don't have a gun. But you know what I do have? A clear line of sight to your fresh and hopefully very painful wounds, and newsflash, I know how to make them hurt. So I'm going to leave now, and you aren't going to follow me, or trail me, or kill innocent police officers while I'm trying to run away."

She realizes all at once that they're both cop killers now, and she isn't quite quick enough to keep the anguish off her face. Ward is watching her closely.

"You don't have to go," he says, seemingly casual. "I'm just out to pick up dinner. Would you like to join me?"

"Are you _serious_?"

"I never joke about taquitos," Ward says, completely straight-faced, and it's such a mockery of their circumstances that it's all she can do to keep her rage from simmering over.

"You know what?" she asks. "Go enjoy your meal. I'm sure the team has an aerial lock on your coordinates by now," _face smooth, direct eye contact, no sign of the bluff_ , "so just do whatever you want. You'll be back in custody before nightfall."

"That's interesting," Ward replies, "since SHIELD vacated the area about 12 hours ago."

_Face smooth, no wrinkles, no emotion_. Skye cocks her head to the side, mockingly, like she knows something he doesn't. "I thought you were smarter than that."

Ward looks at her in that way he has, direct and head-on, even as lines of exhaustion make his whole countenance seem weary.

"I thought I knew a lot of things," he says. "Then you shot me."

"Romance is dead," she responds coldly.

His eyes are still locked on hers, dark and full of something unfathomable. "No, it isn't."

"Fuck you, Ward," she snaps, something she's never actually said to him before, which has obviously been a grave oversight on her part. He doesn't change expression, just stands there looking at her with bags under his eyes and his heart on his sleeve like he has the right to care about her after everything he did, and that's how she leaves him, tired and wounded and watching her walk away. She hopes it hurts.

*

Over the next few days, she wonders a thousand times if she should've left him there. She hadn't had a gun - a situation now remedied - but he was hurt and not on top of his game; if she'd moved quickly and aimed for his wounds, she might have been able to re-open his stitches or maybe even fracture a rib. It would've been a simple matter of calling the police, then. Even a terminator can't overcome a bunch of armed cops while bleeding internally.

She'd had options. If she'd just thought about it, she could have figured out a way to take him down and get him off the streets for good. It would've been a public service.

Weak, that's what she is. Weak, even now; the thought sits sickeningly in her stomach, that she's come so far and she's still _so fucking weak_. She'll kill him the next time she sees him. No more games.

Unfortunately, the next time she sees him, he's already dying.

She's looking out her window at the motel, watching the sun sink behind the horizon and trying to figure out her next move, when she hears rapid popping sounds that have become all too familiar in the past year. She flies to her feet with her Glock in her hand before she even consciously registers the thought _gunfire_. Then she sees Ward, hurling around the corner and clutching his side, his face a mask of agony as he barrels across the parking lot and practically slams into door #106.

She doesn't go outside. She thinks about it, and she can feel, with her freaky super-senses, the steady _thump thump thump_ of three men about to turn the corner and come after Ward. She could go outside and warn him. Or shoot him. Or shoot _them_.

Instead, she stays by the window and watches.

Three men run into the parking lot. Ward is scrabbling at the door, clumsy in a way she's never seen before, as the men surround him. They aren't wearing anything identifiable or particularly Nazi-like, but Skye knows HYDRA operatives when she sees them.

They raise their guns to Ward. Across the walkway, a curtain twitches at another window, but no one comes out.

Skye wonders, in a numb, detached kind of way, if she's about to see Ward die, and then the door to #106 is flung open and May steps out as Ward falls in.

It takes a second for Skye to realize that it isn't really May. It's Agent 33, her face - May's face - still horribly burned on one side. But her scars don't have any effect on her marksmanship, and as Skye watches, she drops the center HYDRA agent before he even realizes another threat has entered the equation.

She's good, Skye thinks. Her vibrations are sleek and clean.

The two remaining HYDRA agents return fire, and Agent 33 ducks back into the room, bullets splintering the wooden doorframe. They seem to have forgotten about Ward, which is good, because Skye can see him planting his feet and pushing his body inside with the strength of his legs. It's taking a lot longer than it should. He must be badly injured.

Agent 33 fires again, one shot, and another HYDRA operative goes down.

The last one takes refuge behind one of the motel's gaudy pillars; he stops firing, and the silence hangs uneasily in the air. It's a game of chicken, both Agent 33 and the HYDRA guy waiting for the other to reveal themselves first. Skye is surprised to find that her heart is beating hard. She doesn't have a stake in this fight. They could take each other out for all she cares. She isn't concerned about any of them.

Ward's feet have completely disappeared into the room.

"Why are you doing this?" Agent 33 calls, and Skye is shocked all over again to hear her voice, because it's _May's_. Mechanical, yes, and with the wrong tones and inflections, but still undeniably familiar.

"Your friend took something he shouldn't have," the HYDRA agent replies, and his voice is surprising too, a pleasant, masculine one that might draw Skye's attention in any other scenario. "There's no reason we have to be uncivilized, though. If you just return it, I'll - "

"Leave in peace?" Agent 33 scoffs.

"Sure," the HYDRA agent says genially.

"With your dead colleagues all around you?"

"They were dicks."

"I'd rather just shoot you," Agent 33 says. "It's easier."

"A bit excessive, though," the HYDRA agent replies.

"Yes," Agent 33 agrees, and then she has her shot perfectly aligned, and she drops the guy with a third and final bullet right between the eyes. She's _really_ good, Skye thinks grudgingly, as the body of the HYDRA agent crumples to the pavement, the man never realizing that she'd been distracting him with conversation the entire time. Skye feels almost sorry for him. She isn't used to HYDRA agents being anything other than nameless, faceless borgs.

Gun still cocked, Agent 33 scans the perimeter to locate any more threats, but there's no one else. The world is still. She lowers her weapon, turns back to her room and slams the door behind her, leaving the three HYDRA agents to lay dead and forgotten in the parking lot.

Skye looks at the sun. It's almost completely set. Her father wanted to teach her about the stars.

Glock tucked into the back of her jeans, Skye leaves her room, crosses the parking lot, and knocks on door #106.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the reviews! :D If you don't feel like googling my lame jokes, Skye and Coulson's safety code comes from "Lola" by the Kinks, and Skye's binary love note to Ward spelled L-O-S-E-R. He had no idea.


	3. Chapter 3

Agent 33 tries to shoot her through the door, which makes tactical sense but is still pretty rude.

Skye throws herself sideways just in time. She doesn't know how she would explain it to anyone who asked, but the particles in the air simply _shift_ , and she knows before it happens that Agent 33 is going to fire. She jumps aside in a flash - no thought, only instinct, her body moving in the blink of an eye - and her powers come to life as the bullet whizzes past, urging her to do something destructive, to take down the room and the motel and everyone in it.

Instead, Skye leans over to the door and shouts, "Hey, face thief!"

There's muttering inside the room. She can't hear it, but she can feel it in the air.

"I just saw you take down three HYDRA agents," she calls. "Either you're not working for them anymore or you're probably _really_ fired."

There's a scraping sound, maybe something being moved. More muttering. Just as Skye is wondering if she's brave enough to press her eye to the new bullet hole in the door, it swings open, revealing an annoyed May - no, an annoyed Agent 33 - and Ward bleeding all over the carpet.

"Get in," the other woman hisses. Skye complies.

Up close, Ward looks even worse than he did from her window; he's pale and trembling, sweat dotting his upper lip, and his shirt has been ripped off to reveal several bloody bandages unraveling from his chest.

"If you're here to finally take that shot at my head, I'd welcome it," he says, voice tight with pain.

"That isn't funny," Agent 33 snaps.

"Look at me smiling," Ward says. He isn't. Skye remembers that he tried to kill himself three times while in captivity, and she wonders where his threshold lies, where the scales tip from indestructible super-spy to a man who was willing to slam his head against concrete to end it all.

"I like your choice in motels," she says instead. "I assume you followed me back here the other night after I told you not to."

"Sorry," Ward replies, sounding completely unapologetic.

Her gun is itching at the small of her back, but somehow, she doesn't have the heart to draw it. The rage isn't as strong as usual. Maybe it's because the death toll climbed to eleven last night and she spent several hours crying herself into an exhausted sleep, not even remembering the names anymore but hating herself for every one. Maybe it's just because Ward is so clearly and abjectly pitiful, bleeding to death on a stained motel carpet while a twisted version of his former lover swears over his grimy bandages.

Speaking of which...

"Will you take that off already?" Skye asks Agent 33. May's face is creeping her out, and her powers are most definitely responding to her mood; she feels an intense buzz as the vibrations of her body seem to gather in the pit of her stomach and wait for launch.

"Mind your own business," Agent 33 snarls, at the same time Ward says, "She's not allowed to."

Skye looks back and forth between them. "Not _allowed_ to?"

"Whitehall ordered it," Ward answers. His words are starting to slur at the edges. "It's her punishment. She failed in her mission, so she has to wear the face to remind her."

What the hell?

"Whitehall is dead," Skye says, feeling her eyebrows draw together in her face. "You can take it off now."

"That's what I said," Ward mumbles.

"I can't," Agent 33 snaps.

"We're working on it," Ward tells Skye tiredly.

There are a million things Skye could say about this bizarre turn of events, starting with _since when are you in a league with Agent 33?_ and _are all HYDRA leaders like Disney villains, or was that just your boss' special charm?_ Before she can decide on something suitably scathing, though, Ward gasps, his head slamming back against the floor as the tendons on his neck stand out rigidly. The blood coming from his wound has started to bubble.

Agent 33 springs into action, her hands bracketing his chest, her hair swinging low as she bends over his frame. Apparently she isn't pleased by what she sees, because her lips flatten as she reaches for her bag.

Skye can't resist. She really can't. "What's the damage?" she asks.

Agent 33 doesn't even spare her a glance. "Four bullet holes, three of them through-and-through. Fractured rib. Partially collapsed lung. The former probably caused the latter." She pulls several things out of her bag, including a syringe, a hollow needle and even more gauze. "He was healing all right before this, but we got some intelligence this afternoon - " she jerks her head at a police scanner on the bedside table, "and this guy just had to rush out and act on it - "

"What kind of intelligence?" Skye asks, thinking of the HYDRA operative saying _your friend took something he shouldn't have_ , but the other woman isn't listening.

"What the hell were you thinking?" she demands of Ward, doing something to the needle that attaches it to the syringe. He's breathing rapidly, his blood frothy and red. "I told you to be careful about that rib. Any kind of pressure against it and you were looking at lung damage. You must have a death wish."

"That's a really big needle," Ward gasps.

"Yes, it is," Agent 33 says, and plunges it directly into his chest.

Skye makes a sound, she can't help it, _Jesus Christ_. Ward is silent, but his eyes are squeezed shut and his body is completely rigid with pain, so he's obviously doing his stoic hero routine. It makes Skye intensely uncomfortable to see it, and she's angry with herself even as she's twisted with a deep, primal sympathy, because wasn't she just scolding herself about weakness?

She should go. Better yet, she should pull out her gun and shoot them both.

_Public service_ , she reminds herself.

But if she can't kill Ward when he's a fully-functioning douchebag, there's just no way she can kill him when he's already down.

She watches, glued to the spot in both worry and revulsion, as Agent 33 sucks air out of Ward's chest with a gigantic needle-syringe nightmare hybrid. Ward's vibrations are like live wires snapping over his body, jerking erratically, frantically, even as the man himself is completely still. Skye wonders if she's seeing his pain, his emotions, or simply his body's energy.

"How long do you have to keep doing that?" she asks Agent 33, when the needle makes a particularly disgusting sucking noise. The other woman leans back on her knees.

"I'm done."

Ward does seem to be breathing better, though he doesn't relax fully until the needle is out, his hands unclenching and his head turning limply to the side. Agent 33 looks unimpressed. Apparently taking Skye as an ally, she turns to her for her next announcement.

"He's lost too much blood. I need better supplies, ones I don't have here. But I'm honestly not sure he'll last long enough for me to go and get them."

She looks expectantly at Skye, then, and even though she isn't really May, even though her features are so disfigured it should make comparisons impossible, Skye still feels herself wanting to respond to that face, the one that can raise a single eyebrow and communicate volumes, the one that pushes in a smile like a dimple when Skye finally nails a move during training.

Skye is suddenly so homesick it hurts, and maybe that's why her voice is so harsh when she says, "Good. Let him die."

Ward looks at her from the floor. For once, he doesn't argue. He doesn't start a monologue. He just looks at her, eyes moving slowly from her nose to her cheeks to her mouth and back again, and Skye realizes that he's drinking her in, that he's trying to memorize her face before he dies right there in a no-name motel from her own bullets. She doesn't know what a normal person should be doing in this situation. Her heart is clenching painfully.

"Look, I don't have time to play Romeo and Juliet with you," Agent 33 says, standing up. "Stay here. Don't stay here. I don't care. But I'm going to get supplies."

"Why would you bother?" Skye asks, honestly wanting to know.

Agent 33 looks confused, then angry, then forlorn. The emotions whip across her face so fast Skye can hardly track them.

"He helped me," she says eventually, the words slow and hesitant like she's testing them. She toys with the needle still in her hand, and for the first time in their acquaintance, Skye can see some of the woman she used to be. "He needed me."

Skye looks back at Ward. His eyes have slid shut, and while his chest is still rising and falling, his vibrations are settling gently on top of his body, coating him like a layer of snow before a long sleep.

He'd helped Skye, too.

Helped her, betrayed her, kidnapped her. Held her at gunpoint.

Told her he loved her.

_You know how I feel about you, Skye_ , he'd said.

It would have hurt less if he'd been lying.

"Go get your supplies," Skye tells Agent 33, not even believing the words coming out of her mouth. "Whatever you need. Bandages, antibiotics - "

"I know what to find," the other agent replies. "I used to be a field medic."

"Then go," Skye says. "Quit wasting time. I'll stay with him." Her eyes fall on Ward again, his pale, sweaty face, the blood running in rivulets down his chest. She'd felt those muscles once, smoothed her hands over them as he kissed her breathless. She remembers slamming her fists against them, too, when the truth came out and she'd been so furious she wanted to rip him limb from limb. Nothing with Ward is simple. Every memory she has of him is tainted.

Every memory except this one: a motel floor, his eyes on her face, her heart in her throat.

"Go," she repeats, and Agent 33 strides to the door and is gone.

To Ward's unconscious form, she says, "Don't make me regret this."

*

Cramped in a motel chair, sitting sentinel by the window, Skye has a dream about her father.

_They won't understand you_ , he'd said, and in her dream she sees it for the truth: May is holding a gun on her, and Fitz is clutching a tablet while backed in a corner, and Simmons is wearing surgical gloves and saying, _I'm sorry, we just have to take a look at your organs_. Skye tries to tell them that she quit SHIELD, that she isn't a threat to anyone, but then Coulson is there, and he locks her in the basement cells and says _now don't tell him anything, it's important that you don't give anything away._

_Who?_ Skye asks, but of course the answer is Ward.

He's a dark figure in the distance, so dark that she can't see his face, and he doesn't move, only stands there watching her. Skye shoots him once, twice, three times, but he doesn't even flinch. Something is wrong. An alarm goes off in the cell, wailing loudly, as she empties her entire clip into him. This isn't right; Ward had showed plenty of emotion when she shot him, arms flying up to defend himself and eyes wide with pain and shock.

In the darkness, this man looks like he doesn't have any eyes at all.

Skye wakes up confused and frightened, and it takes her a minute to realize that the alarm isn't just a vestige of her dream. She's hearing sirens, real sirens, and they're headed her way. The police are maybe sixty seconds out. Their noises make loud, ugly vibrations that cut across her vision like knives.

Ward is still unconscious on the floor. There's no sign of Agent 33. Skye has exactly one gun on her person.

There are bad days, and then there are bad days for SHIELD agents, and then there are bad days for ex-SHIELD agents on the run.

She has time to flee; she knows that instinctively. She could just open the door and go. Even without her superpowers, sixty seconds is more than enough for someone who's been training under Melinda May. Hell, it's almost leisurely.

But what about Ward?

He isn't getting any better. In fact, he's steadily worsened over the past hour. Skye hasn't touched him, has actively avoided looking at him, letting him stay there on the floor with his dirty bandages and dried blood. But the color is so gone from his face that he looks like a corpse, and every so often his breath will turn into a wheeze.

Does she stay? She'll get arrested. Ward might be taken to a hospital, or he might be executed in the back of an ambulance by HYDRA loyalists posing as emergency responders.

Does she leave? If they leave, Agent 33 won't be able to find them again, and Ward is dead anyway without her medical knowledge.

The sirens are red bursts in front of her eyes. Skye's entire body is tensed for a fight, blood and power surging through her.

Should she let Ward die?

_Can_ she let Ward die?

As the cops race into the parking lot, she makes her decision.

" _Policía!_ " comes the shout from outside. " _Tenemos rodeado!_ "

"Okay!" Skye yells back. " _Si!_ Uh, no problemo! Don't shoot! I surrender!"

The word _surrender_ floats through the air like a bubble, energizing some of the cops but only making the others more suspicious. Skye can feel her powers trying to swell, and she desperately clamps down on the feeling or instinct or whatever the hell it is. _Not now_ , she prays. _Not now. Please, not now_.

" _Abre la puerta! Ponga sus manos en la cabeza!_ " the police command, and Skye has seen enough TV to know the universal tone for "put your hands up." She inches behind the door and peers through the bullet hole. There are at least six cop cars out there, their lights flashing angrily in the darkness, and - oh, fuck. They're standing around the bodies of the dead HYDRA agents. No one thought to move them.

"I'm opening the door," Skye calls, forcing her voice to remain steady. She spent weeks wearing a heart monitor; she can do this. "Don't shoot, all right? I surrender. White flag. You win."

" _Saliera inmediatamente!_ " the police shout. Well, everyone's a critic.

Skye eases the door open. Lights immediately flood the room and blind her, and she can hear the clicks of about a dozen guns being raised and pointed directly at her chest, but that's okay.

She doesn't need her old senses anymore.

In the time it takes the first cop to step forward, Skye lifts her arm, palm out, and _pushes_. She has no idea what she's doing, but her powers respond just as eagerly as she hoped, rushing out of her and slamming into the line of lawmen like a physical force. She hears shouts and gasps cut short as the men are flung backwards in the air. Bones break with audible snaps. One officer, still in his car, screams with abandon as it rises on its back wheels and almost flips over.

_You're a good agent, Skye_ , Coulson had said. _A good person_.

The men land painfully, and everywhere, scattered across the parking lot like jacks.

They're alive. At least some of them are alive. Skye knows this because their vibrations are going crazy, bright and disordered and electric with pain and shock. Her own vibrations are dancing gleefully in the melee. She only has a few seconds now.

After a quick glance to make sure he's still unconscious, she grabs Ward and slings him over her shoulder. He weighs nothing, absolutely nothing. Skye could do anything she wants. She could run right through the police barricade with 180lbs of dead weight on her back and _no one could stop her_.

Focus. Focus.

One hand outstretched in defense, one hand on Ward's bare back, she hurries over to an empty cop car. There's an MDT inside, and yeah, she can work with that. But more than anything she needs to get the hell out of this place.

She arranges Ward in the passenger side as quickly and efficiently as she can, not particularly caring that his head hits the window with enough force to make an audible _thunk_. His wounds are the bigger concern, but there hasn't been any change to them. He isn't bleeding anymore. He isn't doing anything anymore.

Her foot almost slips off the pedal, but she gets it right the second time.

She's reaching one-handed to close the door when she hears the call through the darkness, and at first she thinks she's dreaming again, because there's no way that voice can be here. When she turns, however, her stomach plummets.

Fitz is braking a black van not fifty feet in front of her. Coulson jumps out of the vehicle before it even comes to a stop.

"Skye!" he calls again. "Wait!"

Skye slams her door shut. A cold sweat breaks out on her neck, and her fingers are suddenly fumbling, slippery, as she tries to turn the key in the ignition.

"Skye, please!" This is Fitz, struggling to get the door open with his unresponsive hand, hanging halfway out of the window while Coulson runs full-tilt towards her. "You have to stop! It isn't safe!"

She gets the car going, the engine adding another layer of noise to the cacophony outside. Some of the police officers are stirring, and the air is full of shouts like " _alto!_ " and " _manos arriba!_ " as they swivel their guns from Skye to Coulson to Fitz. Coulson is forced to stop, hands up as he speaks rapid Spanish to the officers. They aren't shooting yet, but it's only a matter of time.

"Skye, please listen to us!" Fitz begs. "We know that, that things are going on with you! We have a new electro- a new electro-" He stops, face twisting, mouth desperate and unhappy, words failing him when it matters most. "We have _tools_ ," he tries instead, "we have new equipment, we can _help_ \- "

Skye jerks the car into motion, wheels screeching on the pavement as she tries to maneuver around the destruction of the parking lot. She feels her entire body trembling with the effort of not blowing up and making a bad situation even worse. She decides to go right, to keep Fitz and Coulson out of the line of fire when the officers start shooting.

Too late, she realizes this move gives them both a clear view of Ward, his head lolling against the passenger side window.

Coulson stops talking. Fitz stops shouting.

The cops are shooting at her now, bullets pinging off her stolen vehicle as she races through the parking lot to the sanctuary of the highway. It would be too late to turn back even if she wanted to, and in a hail of gunfire, she really doesn't want to. Ward slumps deeper at her side, and her heart hammers like a jackrabbit's, her nerves alight as her powers demand _more, more, more_. She hits the darkness of the open road and floors it.

The last thing she sees in her rear view mirror is Fitz's face, wide-eyed and betrayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't speak a lick of Spanish, so if anyone wants to correct my probably very embarrassing translations, feel free. I should also disclaim that all my medical knowledge comes from googling "what happens when you get shot four times in the chest," and the answer is pretty uniformly "it depends," so I just went with something that sounded likely.


	4. Chapter 4

On a long, dusty road to nowhere, with darkness pressing against all sides of the car, Skye finally admits to herself that Ward is dying.

She doesn't know how long she's been driving, but she hasn't seen any signs of life for miles. Ward is an unconscious heap in the seat beside her. He might as well be a corpse for all the comfort he provides. Skye finds herself actually straining her powers to see his vibrations, but they're so faint and still they're practically invisible, and that scares her even more than the fact he's no longer struggling for breath. There isn't enough breath left in him for a struggle.

Skye drives for miles in dark, thinking about death and betrayal and stolen kisses in utility closets, his eyes memorizing her face, his life slowly slipping away.

Eventually she stops the car and pulls over.

Her hands are trembling slightly as she retrieves her gun. She looks over at Ward like he's suddenly going to pop awake, like he's suddenly going to demand _and what, exactly, are you doing?_ in that half-annoyed, half-amused tone he'd employed whenever Skye had tried to liven up their training sessions by drawing devil horns on their paper targets.

But this Ward doesn't do anything. He's exactly where she left him, bloody and shirtless and silent as the grave.

Skye gets out of the car and crosses to the passenger side. After a long moment of consideration, she pulls Ward from the seat and lays him on the ground. He's completely limp and unresisting. She could arrange him any way she wanted, could put him face-down in the dirt like a traitor deserves.

Instead, she leaves him on his back, face tipped vacantly towards the stars. The lights from the police car cast deep shadows over his cheeks.

She takes a deep breath.

She aims the gun at his head.

 _Why didn't you aim at my head before?_ he'd asked, and Skye hadn't had an answer. Not then. But now the darkness has stripped her logic away and left her with nothing but emotion, and with no one around to hear it - no one but the long, open road and the deathly quiet of the night - she thinks it might be okay to acknowledge the truth that's been sitting at the bottom of her heart like a stone.

She didn't aim at his head because she hadn't wanted him to die.

It's something she would never, ever say out loud. Because of Fitz. Because of Koenig. Because of Victoria Hand. Every time a little voice in her head says _maybe he really does love you_ , all she has to do is look across the empty lab where Fitzsimmons used to work and she's reminded all over again of the destruction he wrought, the damage he left behind. So what if he loves her? _So what?_ That doesn't make up for everything he did.

The little voice is persistent, though. Always has been. And she can't just shut off her heart.

She fell for a guy who loved trivia and board games and labradors. A guy who shielded her with his own body when things started exploding. He let her put bright yellow band-aids on his knife wounds in Nepal. He told her she was the first thing he'd wanted for himself in awhile.

Is that man still in there? She's been torturing herself with the thought for months. Is he all HYDRA? Was everything a lie, even the thousand little details that made up their shared life on the Bus, the things you only know about someone when you wake up to them every morning and say goodnight every evening before bed?

Does _her_ Ward still exist?

Because if he does...

If he does...

It doesn't actually matter anymore.

 _My heart rate is way over 60bpm_ , she thinks, and _May would be so disappointed_ , and then she pulls the trigger.

The bullet misses Ward's head by a good inch.

Skye lets out a shuddering breath, relief at war with frustration. This isn't how she was trained. She needs to get a grip; she needs to shut down her emotions; that's what May would do. She puts herself in a ready stance with both hands firmly holding the gun. One bullet to the midbrain, that's all it will take. One bullet and it'll all be over - she'll never have to worry about him again, she'll never have to see his stupid smirking face or his earnest worried one, she'll never look at the clock at 5:30am and know that he's awake, right then, at that moment, opening his eyes and breathing, blood moving through his body, heart beating solidly in his chest.

One shot and she'll be free.

One shot and she'll be alone.

Her hands are shaking worse than ever; the barrel of the gun has drifted towards his chest instead of his forehead. His blood looks black in the darkness. She wonders if her own blood has changed color now, if it might be an alien blue to match her ancestors. It's quite possible she's delirious.

It's in the midst of this madness, however, that the idea suddenly strikes her, quick as a match and twice as bright.

If the blue blood can heal - if she's _descended_ from the blue people -

GH.325 saved her life. It saved Coulson's. It even saved Garrett's.

Could it save Ward's?

Quickly now, Skye kneels by Ward's side. She doesn't have a syringe, which is how Simmons got the GH.325 into her, but maybe in his mouth - ? Maybe if she just dripped her blood into it - ?

Oh, God, is her blood going to be _enough?_

She doesn't have a knife. No matter. She has super-strength. Skye rakes her nails over her wrist, practically shedding the skin in her haste, blood spurting from the wounds in a messy gush. It hurts. She doesn't care. Right now all that matters is Ward, and Skye grabs the back of his head and lifts it, pressing her bleeding wrist to his mouth, his neck tipped back to receive deliverance.

It's super gross, and blood is spurting all over his mouth and cheeks and face, and Skye herself feels a little like a crazy woman shaking in the dirt, but all she can think is _please, please, please_.

She holds his head until the blood has slowed to a dribble. Then she holds it there a little more. Her arm doesn't tire. Her eyes stay locked on his face. The entire world has gone silent.

Slowly, so slowly that she hardly believes it, Ward's eyes open.

*

They ride for a long time without speaking.

Skye is thinking about practicalities: she'll need to ditch the car soon, she'll need to get some money. There's probably an alert about her on the police scanners; she'll have to hack the system and do something about that. She needs clothes. Food. A new place to sleep.

A place to drop off Ward.

She may have saved his life, but that doesn't mean she's willing to forgive and forget. He's still a wanted man. He still betrayed everyone and everything he claimed to care about. She can't travel with him. She can't trust him.

 _Nothing has changed_ , she tells herself, chanting it like a mantra inside her head, hoping that repetition will make her believe it.

As though sensing the direction of her thoughts, Ward turns to look at her. He found a shirt in the trunk of the car, and it sits too loosely on his frame, gaping at the neck and baggy in the chest. He looks ridiculous. He looks... healthy.

"Why don't you make yourself useful?" she asks, unable to bear the silence a minute longer. "Get on that MDT and figure out what kind of bulletin they've put on us."

"They?" Ward repeats, and Skye is struck by the knowledge that he doesn't know a thing, that he was unconscious for all of it - the standoff, the display of her powers, the race into the night. He has no idea what's going on, she realizes. She could be taking him anywhere. But he hasn't shown any signs of discomfort. He, what, trusts her?

That's a stupid mistake to make.

"We're wanted by the cops," she says sharply. "They came to the motel. Your girlfriend is long gone."

"Kara?"

"Who?" Skye asks, distracted by the sudden thought of Ward having an entire harem of HYDRA girlfriends.

"Agent 33," Ward says, and Skye feels a tendril of shame. She knew that. Kara Lynn Palama, formerly an agent of SHIELD, now brainwashed by HYDRA and wearing another woman's face as some kind of weird ritualistic punishment. Skye had punched that face. She never expected to feel guilty about it.

"She went to get supplies," Skye says, to make up for it. "She wanted to help you. She didn't, like, abandon you or anything."

Ward doesn't reply right away, watching the passing scenery in silence. After a moment, he says, "Neither did you."

Skye doesn't know how to answer that.

Ward continues staring out the window. One hand comes up to scratch his chest. He isn't completely healed - Skye wasn't either, even when she had the good stuff injected right in her veins - but he looks like he's been recovering for days instead of hours. The color is back in his face, and his various wounds have scabbed over. He's breathing regularly as well, so as long as he doesn't re-fracture that rib, Skye guesses his lungs will be okay. He'll just need to move carefully for a few days.

Not, she thinks, that she'll be around to see it.

"I should ask," Ward says, and Skye is startled to realize that he's watching her reflection, that he's been looking at her while she's been looking at his chest. Busted.

"There's nothing to say," she replies, jerking her eyes back to the road.

"I think there might be a little to say."

"You're alive. Count your blessings and be done with it."

"I'm mostly just interested in the how," he offers. "And why we were both covered in blood."

It's splattered all over Skye's shirt. There's a small spot Ward missed under his chin. He's looking at her out of the corner of his eye, testing, gauging. It's a familiar expression.

"I fed you my blood like a vampire," Skye says. Let him analyze _that_.

Sure enough, the information gives him pause. She enjoys several whole seconds of it, Ward clearly trying to work it out, his vibrations starting and stopping and starting again.

"Really?" he eventually asks.

"Yep," Skye says, giving her wrist a casual turn in the air, where the wounds have mostly healed but the skin is still pinkish with smeared blood.

"... _Really_?" he asks again.

Skye glances over. Ward looks completely weirded out, and the expression is so normal, so _pre-Nazi revelation_ , that she has to wrench her eyes away before she does something stupid like laugh, or cry, or both. Dawn is approaching, the distant horizon just a shade lighter than the rest of the sky, and she decides she wants him out of this car with the sunrise.

They drive a few more minutes in silence.

"Do you think I'll start writing in alien symbols now?" Ward asks.

For a moment, Skye is tempted to say yes. Petty revenge is still revenge. But for reasons she doesn't entirely understand, she keeps looking forward at the road and says, "I don't think so. Coulson stopped after we found the city. That's what the compulsion was for, probably."

"Locating the city?"

"Leading people to the motherland," Skye affirms.

"Makes sense." Ward's tone is thoughtful, friendly. Encouraging. Skye abruptly realizes that he's manipulating her, that he's trying to get her to engage in conversation like nothing ever went wrong between them, that _son of a bitch_. She grits her teeth and resolves not to say another word.

This lasts exactly sixty seconds, and then Ward asks conversationally, "So where are we going?"

Skye's hands clench around the steering wheel. "Where _I_ am going is none of your business. _You_ can go whatever you want."

"We should stick together," Ward says, like he didn't even hear her. "I'm still healing, and you shouldn't be on your own."

A year ago she would've raised her eyebrows and said _I can take care of myself, but thanks for that, Misogyny Man_. And he would've looked all offended and said _I'm just trying to watch out for you. I'm your S.O. That's my job._ And she would've smirked to cover her rising flush, but her body would've betrayed her by leaning forward a little, arcing towards him, bringing her head close like she was sharing a secret.

 _Admit it_ , she would've said, eyebrows wiggling at full force. _I'm a good student._

 _You're_ something _all right_ , he would've replied, but the look in his eyes would've been a million miles from annoyed.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," Skye says, and if her heart is breaking then at least it isn't in her voice. "I'm not helping you anymore. This is it, Ward. We're done. Thanks for all the memories of kidnap and murder, but I'm finished with you."

"Then why am I still in the car?" Ward asks.

_Why didn't you aim at my head before?_

Such simple questions.

She hates herself even more now that she knows the answers.

She slams on the brakes, giving Ward no time to prepare for the stop; he jerks forward and almost hits his head on the dashboard. That annoys him, she can tell, and it makes something twist with satisfaction in her gut, because the only thing she hates more than his smirking overconfidence is his whole zen acceptance of his evil. He _should_ be annoyed. He should be _furious_. He should be completely consumed with rage that she shot him and left him to die. That's what HYDRA agents do.

"Get out," she commands, the car motionless but her hands still on the steering wheel, ready to take off as soon as he does.

"Okay," Ward says. "You've made your point."

"Apparently not clearly enough," Skye says. "I don't know what stupid, idiotic, moronic compulsion made me save your life, but it's gone now, I promise. So get the hell out of the car. Hitchhike. Jump off a cliff. I don't care."

"I think you do," Ward says, and he's back to his calm expression now, annoying her so much she can practically feel the flames on the side of her face. "I think if you didn't care, you wouldn't have saved my life, and definitely not by slitting your own wrist - "

Woah, woah, woah. "I didn't _slit_ my _wrist_ ," Skye says, snapping off each word like a bullet. "I just tore into it with my freakish super strength - "

Ward doesn't so much as twitch, but Skye immediately realizes what she just gave away, and now her anger is self-directed. It seems like that's all she is anymore, angry and heartsick and self-loathing. She can't stand it. She flings open her door and walks a short distance from the car, not caring where she's going but just needing _out_ , away from Ward and all the complicated bullshit he brings.

She takes refuge at the bottom of a hilly area where dawn is slowly creeping over the landscape. She crosses her arms and tries to get her bearings. After a moment, Ward comes up silently behind her, stopping at a respectful distance. The two of them stand for a minute in the lighting day.

"I think you should turn yourself in," she finally says.

Ward is quiet for a moment, but she doesn't turn around. "Is that what you want?" he says at length.

"It doesn't matter what I want," Skye says. "Or it shouldn't. You're a serial killer. You can't just - _get away_ with being a serial killer." It sounds stupid when she says it out loud, but Ward seems to be listening, so she barrels on. "It doesn't have to be SHIELD. You can turn yourself in to the regular police. Your brother - " Should she mention the brother? Well, too late now. "Your brother made you public enemy #1. If you just walked into a police station and told them you were Grant Ward - "

He would be killed by HYDRA as soon as they could deploy men.

"You should make it right," Skye says anyway. "For Fitz. For everyone."

"For you?" Ward asks.

Skye looks into the sun. It's bright and warm and beautiful. A few hours ago, Ward was dying in the dark.

"I don't care what you do," she lies.

She hears footsteps approaching behind her, and she steps away quickly, arms still crossed over her chest. Ward stops and doesn't try to come any closer. His voice, when he speaks, is tired. "I've thought about it," he says. "Turning myself in. But I don't want to."

 _Well, if that's the case_ , Skye wants to say, but she just doesn't have the energy.

"You don't know what it was like in that cell," Ward continues, voice low. "I deserved it. I know I did. But it was - " He stops. His vibrations have starting growing, buzzing, agitated in their distress. "I spent every minute in there worried about you. I took for granted that I'd always be around to protect you. I kept thinking of all the ways SHIELD agents had died in the past, all the rookies that never made it past their first year, and Coulson wouldn't tell me anything about you. He kept trying to barter. Said he'd answer one question about you if I'd give up one base or one weapons stockpile."

Skye turns at that. She can't help it.

Ward keeps talking, his words coming out in a rush. "I refused. You can't compromise with a guy like Coulson. Any sign of weakness, any at all, and he'd exploit it while never giving anything back. It's what we're trained to do," he adds quickly, and she wonders what expression is on her face. "All SHIELD agents are."

She tries to get herself back on familiar ground. "You do realize that's the point of prison, right? You aren't supposed to like it."

"Mission accomplished," Ward says, and now the distress is plain on his face. "Skye, I wanted to know about you so badly that I almost drove myself insane. But I couldn't give in to Coulson. It would've been the end of everything. So I had to wait for him - for the team - to get so desperate they'd send you."

"And then they did," Skye says.

"And then they did," Ward echoes.

The sun has fully risen on his face, painting his skin in pinks and yellows, his brown eyes lightening to hazel. He looks at her like a drowning man.

"I can't go back to that cell, Skye," he says hoarsely. "I can't turn myself into SHIELD. I can't turn myself into the regular police. The only thing I can do is die, but apparently no one wants that, either."

Three suicide attempts.

_You must have a death wish._

Four?

"I don't know what you want me to say," Skye tells him, returning some of his honesty. It feels strange but not entirely unpleasant. "Do you want me to forgive you? I can't. You're evil. You know you're evil. Am I just supposed to accept that?"

"I have a safehouse," Ward says. "It's in Anasco. We could be there in less than a day even if we stick to the back roads."

"I'm not staying at a safehouse with you," Skye replies, the idea so ludicrous it's almost amusing. She may not be able to kill him, but after a few days of his company, she's pretty sure _someone_ would be walking out of that place with a broken jaw.

Ward doesn't seem to share her humor. "Then I'll leave you there. I don't have to stay. I just want to make sure you arrive safely."

"Right."

"I mean it, Skye."

"Do you really expect me to believe you'll take me to your super-secret base and then leave me be?"

"I want you safe," Ward says, his words fevered, his gaze locked on hers. "That's the only thing that matters to me."

Skye looks at him for a moment, his eyes a golden brown, his stubble a few days old. His expression is intense, but she can see the fatigue beneath it, a kind of bone-deep weariness that he wears the same way he wears his too-large shirt. His wounds are underneath there. If she ran her hands over them, she might feel scar tissue by now. He still has a bit of her blood under his chin.

"Let me take you to the safehouse," Ward says to her silence. "Just let me get you there. If you want me gone afterwards, I'll leave. I promise."

_I promise._

_It's true, and so will be every word I say to you for the rest of my life._

_I'm trying to protect you._

She's a fool. She's such a fool. But she's tired, and the sun is up, and her blood is running through his veins because she just couldn't let him die.

"To the safehouse, then," she says. When Ward starts to break into a smile, she quickly adds, "That's _it_ , Ward. You're just a chauffeur. No more games."

"No more games," Ward agrees, but he still looks pleased. That won't do.

"You're riding in the back," she says, and turns and trudges her way back to the cop car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you so much to everyone leaving feedback and encouragement. I'm also at [Tumblr](http://lettherebedaisy.tumblr.com) if you want to come play.


	5. Chapter 5

When Skye wakes up, it's to the dizzying, disorienting feeling of not knowing where she is, and she automatically reaches for her gun before a warm hand touches the back of her wrist.

"It's all right," Ward says. "You're here with me. We're headed to the safehouse. You fell asleep."

They're in a new car. It's dark again, which means - Jesus, did she sleep _all day_? The last thing she remembers is staring out of the passenger side window and furiously ordering herself not to pass out, because no matter how exhausted she was, no matter how many nostalgic conversations they had about the cold creepy death cells, Ward was still the enemy and there was a non-zero chance that he would handcuff her and drive her to the edge of a cliff and demand she marry him or die.

"Where are we?" she asks.

"Near the outskirts of Moca," he says, which is in fact marginally relaxing, because it means San Juan is finally behind them. They'd wound up burning the police car - too much blood, too many fingerprints - but you never know.

Ward's fingers are still resting lightly on her wrist. She jerks her arm away.

"I picked up some sandwiches," he says, not offended in the slightest. "They're in the back there."

Skye grabs them blindly, unwilling to take her eyes off Ward, but after a few bites she's forgotten all about him and their journey and even the world outside, because she's ravenously hungry and the sandwiches are amazing. It's street food, but the good stuff, greasy and fatty and absolutely dripping with sauce. It's entirely possible Skye has died and gone to heaven.

Then she realizes there are no tomatoes - there are onions and cheeses and spices, but no tomatoes - and just like that her stomach is in knots again, because he remembered.

God _damnit_.

"I've been thinking," Ward says while she pokes at her meal, not sure if she has an appetite anymore. "You should probably call the team."

"Excuse me, what?" Skye asks.

"They care about you." Ward says this like a statement of fact, like it's inconceivable that people could know Skye and not care about her. "And I saw your face when we were talking about SHIELD. You miss them. You should talk to them."

How the hell did they get on this topic?

"Thank you for the wonderful team-building advice," Skye says, wounded and bewildered, "but the next time I want some I'll ask a guy who didn't _betray his_."

Ward doesn't have an answer for that, which is just as well, because now he has her thinking about the team and it's pressing a deep, tender place inside her, an ache she's refused to acknowledge because it's simply too painful to face head-on. Her friends are out there somewhere. They're going on without her. They've probably held a service for Trip by now, and she wasn't there to pay her respects.

Simmons is probably devastated. She had a thing for him, Skye knows she did; they'd commiserated over his muscles.

May would be there too, silent and grave, fury roiling under her skin where she didn't let anyone see.

Fitz is probably still in shock after their run-in at the motel. Skye wonders if he's told everyone about it, if they all know that she saved Ward and is presumably on the run with him. She wonders if they understand or if they hate her for it.

She thinks of May again and her stomach clenches.

She tries not to think of Coulson at all.

"You don't have to call them," Ward says, misinterpreting her silence. "It can just be you and me. I only thought - " He pauses and actually seems lost for a moment. Skye watches, not offering any help. Let him flounder.

"I have a cell," he says finally. "If you want it. That's all."

Skye doesn't answer, because she can't be sure if this is a trap or a sincere offer, but either way what she's really thinking is _there's no fucking way you're getting their numbers in your phone_. She may have quit the team, but she can still protect them. She owes them that much.

"Do you want to stop for dinner?" Ward asks after a moment, clearly fishing, trying to draw her back into conversation. "Get some real food?"

"No."

Ward drums his fingers on the steering wheel. "Look, I know you aren't happy about this, but we're still awhile from the safehouse - "

"I can't be around people," Skye says flatly.

Eleven dead, who knows how many more at the motel, police officers and HYDRA agents lying forgotten in the parking lot, Trip and his face crumbling into nothing. Skye leaves a trail of destruction wherever she goes. She isn't putting any more good people at risk.

That's why she's with Ward.

He doesn't question her antisocial behavior, for which she's grateful; she knows he's curious because she would be too, because that's how they're trained. But he lets her keep her secrets. They just keep driving, and Skye is reminded of another night, another road, the darkness stretching endlessly before her while Ward slumped over in the passenger seat like a dead thing.

She isn't sure if this suddenly-concerned-about-the-team Ward is an improvement.

*

They wind up stopping at an all-night diner when Ward's stomach starts growling. It surprises Skye so much she actually stares at him, because she's never heard such a mundane sound coming from a super spy; she'd just assumed it was something they trained out of you at the SHIELD academy, like electroshocking you whenever you looked too long at a piece of cake. Or maybe she'd just assumed robots didn't have human impulses like the rest of the world.

She could really go for a piece of cake.

She would rather eat dirt than tell him.

"You sure you don't want anything?" Ward asks, halfway out of the car. He parked it about a quarter mile from the diner, close enough that they can see the gaudy green-and-purple lights and the cars surrounding the building, but far enough that Skye can't make out any people or hear any conversations. Maybe she's being paranoid. She doesn't care. The little girl's name was Maria.

"Just go," she says, and after another one of his uncomfortable, searching looks, he departs. She watches his back disappear into the shadows. It's strong and sure, no hesitation to his movements anymore; she hasn't seen his chest, but she's willing to bet it healed perfectly. Nothing but scar tissue there. Scars like hers.

When she's sure he's gone, she pulls a cell from her pocket and calls Simmons.

Like he's the only one who can lift a phone?

The line clicks as Simmons answers, but she doesn't say anything, which is standard SHIELD protocol for an unknown number to their personal cells. Skye is completely unprepared for the wave of emotion this brings out in her. Somehow it brings a lump to her throat, the thought of Simmons breathing on the other end of the line, waiting patiently, following the rules because it makes her feel nice. Her own voice is more of a croak when she says, "Hey. It's me. Um. Skye."

There's a pause lasting a nanosecond, and then -

" _Skye?_ " Simmons all but shrieks. "Oh, Skye, please don't hang up, please talk to me - "

"Woah, hey," Skye says, "I _am_ talking to you, that's why I called, to talk to you - "

"It's just that you hung up on Coulson," Simmons says, talking over her in that fast excited way that comes out around science experiments, weird dissections, and really good cups of tea. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but he was in the lab when he got the call, I was showing him how we might use hydrodynamic separators to improve the efficacy of the quinjet's structural BMPs - "

"God, I miss you," Skye says, entirely without thinking, and then she could kick herself, because she and Simmons don't talk like that. It's not their thing. They're cool.

Simmons, however, is silent for a moment, and then she says, "It's certainly different here without you" in a quiet voice, and Skye has to bite her lip really hard.

"I'm sorry," she says. "For what it's worth. I know... I know I left you guys hanging."

"Are you coming back?" Simmons asks tentatively. "Coulson said you wanted to quit SHIELD, but that's ridiculous, right?"

Silence.

"Right?" Simmons repeats.

Skye's heart is rolling over and over in her chest. "He's telling the truth," she forces herself to say. "But I didn't want to quit, Simmons, I really didn't - "

"Oh, _Skye_ ," Simmons says, clearly upset even with hundreds or possibly thousands of miles between them, and Skye has to lean forward and rest her head against the dashboard because she can see Simmons' face in her mind, the little scrunch of anxiety between her eyebrows, the way her eyes get bright but never actually cry. Simmons had told her once that it didn't count as crying if you didn't let the tears fall. Skye had said _um, I'm pretty sure that's not how it works_ and Simmons had smiled kind of sadly and said _yes, I know_.

"I can't talk about it," Skye says, the closet thing to truth that she can give her friend. "I shouldn't even be calling, really. I just wanted to..."

She stops, because why _is_ she calling? What made her think this was a good idea in the first place? This is ridiculous. She blinks rapidly, keeping the tears from falling.

"I just wanted to check in," she says, and doesn't add _I miss you so much it hurts_ and _please don't do team things without me_.

Simmons doesn't reply right away, and it wouldn't surprise Skye if she heard the unsaid words hanging between them. When she speaks, her voice is gentle. "You can come back, you know. No questions asked. Whatever's going on, we can figure it out together - "

"That's not gonna happen."

"Skye - "

"There's nothing to be figured out," Skye says. She's still blinking, the water in her eyes making a kaleidoscope of color in front of her, but not a single tear has escaped. "This is what's best for everyone. Trust me."

"Are you sure about that?" Simmons asks. There's a creaking noise from her end of the line, which Skye knows to be a stool in one of the medical labs; they'd taken them from an old SSR bunker, and they were horrible and ugly and rackety. Skye imagines Simmons perched on one of them now, phone held to her ear, pink case the exact same shade as one of her polka dot pullovers, and the grief she feels is almost overwhelming.

"I'm sure," she says.

"I'm not," Simmons replies.

Skye huffs the barest hint of a laugh. "Well, you're a scientist. You aren't a human with human emotions."

"I'm not the only one questioning your self-imposed exile!" Simmons says, a little indignantly. "We're all worried, Skye, scientist or not, we all want you to come back - "

But she cuts herself off, words going high and strange at the end, and here's the thing about Simmons: she's a horrible, horrible liar. Skye actually stops breathing for a second, the pain so great and so sudden it lances through her like a blade. She hears what Simmons isn't saying.

There are people at SHIELD who _don't_ want her to come back.

"Oh," Skye says, more to herself than anyone else, but Simmons gets flustered, her words coming out in a rush.

"No, no - there are some concerns, that's all - points were raised - but everyone wants you to come back, they really do - "

"I understand," Skye says, but this only makes Simmons worse.

"We have new tools. An electrosensitivity scope, a seismometer - Fitz bought them, he bought them as soon as we realized - we can _use_ these tools, Skye, and there are other things we can do as well, specialists we can call - or if you want to keep it in-house, no one needs to know - "

"Simmons," Skye says, "if I'm not already on the gifted index, then Coulson isn't doing his job."

There's an appalled silence.

"He wouldn't," Simmons says, and fuck it, Skye is absolutely crying now, no takebacks, the tears are officially spilling over.

"It's his job," she repeats, and the most horrible part is that she understands it completely. Coulson would die for her without a second thought. He'd throw himself in front of a bullet to keep her safe. He might even love her, though the l-word is still kind of scary to Skye, but she knows there's something precious in the way she hugs him, the way he always lets her. Coulson was her father when her real father was still a distant dream.

He's also the director of SHIELD, and she isn't the only one he needs to protect.

Of course he doesn't want her to come back.

"I'll get you off that index," Simmons promises, and it's steely and stubborn, the same tone she used when threatening to kill Ward after bodily stepping in front of Skye. She must know about the motel. She must. There's no way it can be a secret, an ex-SHIELD agent running around with an ex-HYDRA one. It's a legitimate security concern that the team has probably assessed already.

And yet here she is offering to help.

It takes everything Skye has to keep her voice steady when all she wants to do is break down and say _please come get me and take me home_.

"Be careful," is what she says instead, because she knows what Simmons looks like on a mission and it's both terrifying and unstoppable. "Don't do anything illegal, okay? Don't compromise yourself for me."

"Silly," Simmons chides. "That's what team means."

*

Ward comes back with a brown bag, a styrofoam container, and a piece of pie. Skye takes the last without a word. As they hit the road again, she picks through her dessert and tries not to think about her friends

If she's entirely honest with herself, returning to SHIELD was always a backdoor in her mind, a loophole in the code of her current life that she was keeping in reserve in case of total system failure. But what if she really is too dangerous to go back? What if she tries to return and gets the door slammed in her face?

What if this is it? Diner food and stolen cars. Always trying to stay a step ahead of those who would kill her or throw her in prison.

What if she's alone for the rest of her life?

Ward lets her stew awhile, but as they make their way down yet another dark, anonymous road, he asks, "So who did you call?"

She doesn't ask how he knew. Maybe he's telepathic. Maybe that will be the cap to her day. "Fitz," she says, just so he won't ask for more details.

He doesn't flinch. He's too disciplined for that. "I guess it wasn't the mood lifter I was hoping for."

"Cut the crap," she replies.

"Sorry?"

"The nice act. The oh-so-concerned face. It doesn't suit a Nazi."

"I'm not a Nazi," Ward counters, not seeming to realize that a person who needs to make that qualification isn't any better than an actual card-carrying member of Genocide Anonymous. Skye lets her head fall back on the seat. It's only a matter of time, she reminds herself, until they reach Anasco, and then he'll leave and she'll be alone and maybe she'll be able to sleep. She wouldn't mind more sleep. She wouldn't mind going to sleep for a long, long time.

"How far is the safehouse?" she asks, thinking of beds and mattresses and sheets.

"Close," he replies. He'd said the same thing before they stopped for food. Skye has a moment of deja vu, blinking tiredly at the dark landscape through the window, his words bringing to mind those awful green-and-purple lights of the world's tackiest diner -

Wait.

Those green-and-purple lights aren't in her imagination.

"Are you driving in _circles_?" Skye demands, her entire body jolted awake with outrage. "Are you _lost?_ "

Ward glances over and sees the lights too, and the sudden tightness in his expression tells Skye everything she needs to know. She cannot believe this.

"We've been on the road for hours, Ward," she says angrily. " _Hours_. Are you telling me you're too much of a dude to _stop and ask for directions?_ Or were you just hoping the safehouse would suddenly _appear_ \- " A thought slams into her like a two-by-four, and her hand inches under her seat, towards her gun. "Is there a safehouse at all?"

"What?" Ward asks, surprised.

"Is this some kind of plot? Some twisted rape-y plan? Get Skye away from the city, get her isolated - "

" _No!_ " Ward says, sounding genuinely shocked. "Jesus, Skye, I wouldn't - "

"Oh yes you would," she interrupts, and now her powers are rising within her too, little bursts of electricity under her skin, " _maybe I'll just take what I want_ , let's talk about that - "

"We're in Anasco right now," Ward says, and his entire face has shut down. She can't read a single emotion from it. "We can be at the safehouse in twenty minutes."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Yes."

"Do you know how to get there?"

"Yes."

"Then _why are you driving in circles?_ "

"I wanted to spend more time with you."

This statement drops like a nuclear bomb, completely unexpected and utterly annihilating anything that might have come after it.

" _What?_ " Skye demands.

Ward is staring straight ahead, his eyes locked on the road. Something tics in his jaw. "You're angry with me," he says. "I get it. I understand why. I just - " He looks like he's grinding his teeth together, and it's a terrible tell, so terrible it must be real. "I promised. I promised I'd go once we got to the safehouse. And I wanted to be with you a little longer."

Skye is pretty sure her disbelief is written all over her face. "We've been in a car all day. We haven't showered. We're hungry and tired and cramping."

"I'll take what I can get," Ward says.

This is too much. This is just too fucking much.

Skye can't stand another minute in the car with him, so she just opens the door and jumps out.

She can hear Ward swearing behind her, the car screeching and jerking wildly as he brakes in a hurry. Skye doesn't look at it, doesn't need to look at it to know exactly where it is and how much energy is still thrumming beneath the hood. Her body is alight with potential, the world opening itself up to her in her heightened state. Her powers move through her with every breath.

She's unhurt, of course. She could have jumped from a plane and been unhurt. She could have clawed through a mountain and come out sweaty but perfectly fine.

"Are you insane?" Ward yells, coming around the other side of the car, his face the picture of outrage. "You could have seriously hurt yours - "

He stops. She'd jumped from the street to the grassy slope beside it, and she crouches there, the grass cool and alive under her palms, her knees bent and ready to vault. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. All his vibrations have coiled like springs, tense and alert.

"Skye," he says slowly. "Are you all right?"

"No," she responds, crouched like an animal in the grass. It feels amazing, each blade a tiny pinprick of power, the entire field of them stirring gently in the wind and just waiting to be commanded.

"Okay," Ward says, even slower. "Okay. Can I come closer?"

"No," she repeats, this time with an edge.

He ignores her, taking a small step forward, his hands held out to his sides in exaggerated deference. "I'm not going to hurt you," he says, and she actually laughs a little, hysterical with it, because she wanted her Ward back and there he is. Stupid, delusional Ward, who is no more a threat to her than the sixteen ants crawling on the ground, their vibrations tiny little points of a greater whole. Ridiculous, over-confident Ward, who has no idea what he's talking about.

"I'm not the one in danger here," she informs him, and her powers are warm and bright within her.

Ward takes another step closer, disregarding everything she told him, disregarding _anything_ she ever wants. Skye feels a flash of annoyance. "Stay back."

He takes another step.

"Stay _back!_ " she snaps, and suddenly she's on her feet, the anger coming just as strongly and swiftly as the laughter. Is he never going to listen? Is this the new normal of her life, frightened and friendless and fending off Grant fucking Ward?

Her palm is raised.

Her powers are begging her to do it.

"Last warning," she says. "You haven't seen what I can do, but I'm pretty sure you won't like it."

"Is this your gift, then?" Ward asks. He looks cautious but not particularly afraid.

"My gift?" she repeats. "What the hell do you know about my _gift_?"

"I know something happened with the obelisk," Ward replies, and all the air vanishes from her lungs in an instant.

_Trip_ , she'd said.

"I know your mother was special," Ward continues, looking at her intently, "and you are too. Your father told me all about it. He said everything would be revealed when you took the obelisk to the temple and activated it."

_They won't understand you_ , Cal had said.

"The whole place came crashing down." Ward steps closer to her, now. "And I'm guessing that wasn't a coincidence."

_You think I'm an alien?_

"You're running from SHIELD." Ward is approaching, and her hand is shaking, her palm still outstretched. "You activated the obelisk and now you're running from your friends."

_You're a good agent, Skye. A good person_.

"Something happened, didn't it?" Ward asks, and he's way too close, his voice low, his eyes staring hard into hers like he could just reach in and get the answers for himself if he wanted. "Raina was right. The obelisk did wake something up in you. Something that scares you."

_Diablo_.

"I'm not afraid," Ward says, stopping right in front of her, her palm resting on his chest. "Do your worst."

His eyes are dark and serious. She can feel the warmth of his skin on her hand. His shirt is very soft, and for a brief, fleeting moment, there's nothing she'd rather do than curl her fingers in the fabric, lay her head on his chest and cry.

"I think I can make earthquakes," Skye says. And there it is. The truth, undeniable and inescapable. She can make earthquakes, and she's killed more than a dozen people, and if someone came up to her right now with a Time Turner and an invitation to go back to before this whole mess started, she'd seize it and spend the rest of her life living in her van, SHIELD be damned. What kind of person does that make her? What kind of _agent_ does that make her?

_One Coulson doesn't want_ , pipes up the little voice in Skye's head.

"Hey," Ward says gently. He isn't moving, her palm still on his chest. "We can work with earthquakes."

"We?"

"If you'll let me."

Skye removes her hand. It's harder than it should be. "Let you what, exactly?" she asks. "What are you offering here? Are you a secret earthquake expert?"

"Well, no," Ward admits. "But I've been on a few asset evaluations and intakes, so I know the whole speech. Your abilities are a gift, we have the resources to help you with that gift, and so on and so on." He shrugs one shoulder. "What it really comes down to is control. Learning how to recognize what you can do and in which situations you can apply it. Knowing your limits. I can help with that, Skye. It's not so different than training as a specialist."

Training? _Training?_ Like this is just a muscle she can build. "I think it might be a little different," she says.

"Why?"

"I'm incredibly dangerous?"

"In this line of work, dangerous comes with the territory."

"I could hurt you," she says, and not in the fun way she would've said it a year ago, like a super-spy strutting through the world with a license to kill. Now it's weary and brittle, and she looks back on that girl and wonders who it was, because it certainly wasn't her.

"You shot me," Ward points out. "More than once."

"So?"

"So it doesn't matter if you hurt me now, does it?" he asks. "I'm expendable. If you send me hurtling into a crevice, you're just finishing the job you started." Ward says this all without any kind of judgement or condemnation whatsoever. "It's the perfect arrangement. I can show you what it means to control yourself, and you can test yourself against me in ways that you couldn't against anyone from SHIELD. Everyone wins."

The mention of SHIELD sends a little fissure through her heart, but at the same time, she can't help but think of the team. The people currently without a hacker. The people that may not want her back when she's so explosive.

If she could change that...

"Do you really think I can learn to control it?" Skye asks, her head swimming with visions, mistakes, possibilities.

"I think you can do anything you set your mind to," Ward says.

The old Skye wouldn't have done it. She would've been disgusted by the very idea. She wouldn't be here with him in the first place, not after everything he's done, but she's come a long way from looking at his face and thinking he was the worst person she'd ever met. Those were her exact thoughts in the cargo bay when the truth had finally come out: he'd said _my feelings for you are real_ and she'd thought _you're the worst person I know_.

That fact isn't true anymore. Not after Garrett and Whitehall.

Not after eleven dead on a busy market street.

"Okay," Skye says.

"Okay?" Ward repeats.

"Teach me your ways, Obi-Wan," she says. If she can control it... if she can go back... if she can make herself _worthy_ of going back...

Something complicated is happening on Ward's face, some mixture of joy and disbelief and gratitude. "Great," he says. "We'll go to the safehouse. We'll start training." He waits for a second, like Skye is going to object, or like he misunderstood what she said. When she doesn't refute it, a satisfied look spreads across his face. "I hope you're ready to work," he adds, raising an eyebrow.

"I hope you're ready to fall into the earth's crust and die," she says.

"You'll have better control than that," he replies, and damn it all to hell but she actually feels a bit of hope rising inside her. That's his S.O. voice, the stubborn, frustrating, but endlessly confident one, the one that said _nope, you have to do five pull-ups before we call it a day_ just so she would do six and insult his mother the whole time.

He may not be that Ward anymore, but she isn't that Skye either.

Maybe they can salvage something out of the ruins of their lives after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I want this fic to be in-character more than anything else, and that means bringing all their flaws to the table. Ward, for all his romanticism, is still creepy and obsessive and manipulative; Skye, for all her goodness, is still reckless and quick to judge and see things in black-and-white. These idiots are the ones I love, and they're the ones I want to smush together, even if it means mass casualties and burning cop cars in Puerto Rico. Viva la romance!


	6. Chapter 6

"It would help," Ward says, "if you actually used your gift now."

Skye shoots him an irritated look. Sweat is beading on her brow. Her hair clings to her neck in tendrils.

The watermelon continues to mock her.

"Let's see _you_ do it, if it's so easy," she says, not caring how ridiculous she sounds. Ward is leaning casually against the cottage, arms crossed over his chest, infuriating her more and more with every second that passes. She has a gun holstered to her thigh - she always does, in his presence - but it would be admitting weakness if she drew it now.

The watermelon waits patiently on the tree stump, big and plump and completely unchanged despite an hour of Skye attempting to blow it to smithereens.

"You said you made the street explode," Ward points out. "This is the same principle."

"This isn't even in the same _galaxy_ of the principle."

"You didn't create an earthquake out of thin air," Ward repeats for the millionth time. "No one can do something like that. Even Thor doesn't create lightning; he just summons it. So you must have manipulated the environment somehow, maybe something on a seismic level. I need you to replicate it for me before I can determine our next plan of action."

Skye blows her hair out of her face. He hates the presumption he's showing, the ironclad belief that _he'll_ be the one figuring out what's next for Operation: Stop Fucking Things Up, but at the same time it's really hard to argue when he starts throwing around terms like "hypocenter" and "induced seismicity." She's starting to believe he's more of an earthquake expert than she thought.

"Focus," he says, and Skye screws up her face and tries to bend the watermelon to her will like a Jedi. Visualization, that's the key. It's the cornerstone of all SHIELD training, everything from hand-to-hand to long-distance target elimination. Imagine your punches landing; imagine your bullets flying the perfect trajectory. Visualization.

Watermelons are pink in the middle. They have a bunch of seeds. They... taste good.

This is so stupid.

"You're thinking too much," Ward says, still leaning against the wall like he doesn't have a care in the world. "Your gift responds to emotion more than anything else. Try to reach for your feelings instead of any conscious desire to make things explode."

"Would you stop calling it a gift?" Skye gripes, and Ward gives her a look.

"Gift, powers, abilities. It doesn't matter what you call them. You still need to control them."

"I know. I know. It's just - " Skye gestures helplessly. "It's a _watermelon_. You couldn't have drawn a face on it or something? A swastika? I bet I could blow up a HYDRA watermelon."

"What exactly is the problem here?" Ward asks. "You never had this much trouble with the punching bag, not even when you were the greenest rookie to walk through the Bus."

"Not all of us are immediately good at destroying things."

"But you learned pretty well."

Skye is pretty sure they aren't talking about punching bags anymore. "What would you have me do?" she asks, not backing down, because if Ward wants a fight then she can give him a fight. What he wants from her is abundantly clear, but until he admits it out loud - _I want you to kiss me and forgive me and forget all about the fact that I'm a dirty rotten traitor_ \- he's still going to think it's grand and romantic instead of pathetic and impossible.

Ward stares at her, unblinking, and for a second she thinks he's going to take the bait.

Then he says, "Maybe we're approaching your gift the wrong way."

Coward.

"What's the right way?" she asks, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to pump herself up like a boxer ready for the next match.

"We've been trying to build up your strength," he says, which is news to her, because she's just been huffing and puffing at a summertime snack, but okay. "Maybe we should approach the problem from the opposite direction. Maybe your strength is already there, and you need to realize you can call on it whenever you want. One of the first things Garrett taught me - "

He stops, glancing at Skye like she's going to rap him over the knuckles for swearing, but she only looks at him levelly. "Go on," she says.

"He had me demolish a football dummy. Just completely pound it into nothing. I'd spent years reining myself in, so I had no idea what I could really do. He wanted me to know how strong I could be when I finally let go, how much energy I could actually expend when I set my mind to it." He shrugs a little. "From there it was just a matter of holding myself back from that point."

"Wow," Skye says. "That is like the worst advice ever."

Ward looks vaguely offended. "It is not."

"I don't _want_ to expend all my energy," she explains patiently. "I took out an entire street because I was _startled_. I threw a bunch of cops into the air just by doing an impression of 'Stop in the Name of Love.' If I actually tried to exert my powers - "

" - you would move the watermelon," he finishes, and she realizes he might be onto something. Has she been trying? Really trying? Because every time she feels her blood stirring, like the tide of the ocean trying to pull her in, she releases it with a gasp before it can overflow. She feels as though she's holding a great sea inside of her, and one false move will have it gushing from her body like three tons of water thundering out of a broken dam.

"Try it again, Skye," Ward says, but she looks at the tree stump without even seeing it. How can she call on that much power? How? It's too much for her.

Ward pushes himself away from the wall. He comes to stand right behind the stump, both hands on either side of the watermelon. His sleeves are pushed up. His gaze is direct on hers.

"Fitz lasted three minutes without air," he says.

Skye startles violently.

"His brain cells died first. They were deprived of oxygen. Then he had a cerebral edema, with pressure and fluid building inside his skill, and that's why he was unconscious when they found him. The damage was permanent. Another minute or so and he wouldn't have survived at all."

" _What the hell is the matter with you?_ " Skye demands.

"Focus," Ward says urgently. The watermelon is wobbling in his hands. "That emotion right there, you have it, you just need to channel it - "

"Oh, I'll channel it," she snarls, except it isn't the watermelon she's thinking about now, it's Ward. The particles of his body are spiking with energy, and it would be so easy, _so easy_ , to just reach out and grab them, yanking them from his chest like jerking roots out of the earth. How dare he bring up Fitz? How dare he do it for something as insignificant as a _training exercise?_ He isn't sorry at all, she thinks, and the thought only heightens her fury, her imagination now sending her images of his body exploding in place of the watermelon, or maybe _with_ the watermelon, both of them taken out of commission in one satisfying stroke, pink guts and little pieces of viscera flying around in chunks with juices everywhere -

She could -

If she _wanted_ -

The power is _right there_ -

Ward makes a sudden sound, a choked-off gasp, his eyes wide as his hands fly to his head.

Skye feels like she's been doused with cold water all over.

"Oh, God," she says, voice wavering completely out of her control. Ward is lowering his hands, eyes still a little wide, and his vibrations are going crazy, bright particles sparking off each other in a frenzy. "Oh, God, Ward - I'm - I'm so - "

Sorry? _Sorry?_

To _Ward?_

Overwhelmed, out of her depth, powers churning in her body like nausea, Skye gives up and flees. She runs back into the cabin and locks herself in the bathroom and throws up until there's nothing left in her stomach.

*

Ward leaves her alone the next day, so she decides to go snooping.

The cottage isn't bad as far as safehouses go; it's small, and kind of spartan, but it has two bedrooms and kitchen appliances, so it could be worse. The building is also surrounded on all sides by towering trees that afford them complete privacy from the rest of the world, something that Skye appreciates and Ward seems to thoroughly enjoy. He'd taken to living in the woods like a raccoon or something, very capable, very macho.

He's outside now, presumably doing something manly and industrious. When Skye woke up that morning, she'd expected at least a passing comment on the fact she'd almost lost control and blown him up, but he just handed her a cup of coffee.

"Nice morning," he'd said, and left for the great outdoors.

He can be so damn aggravating.

Skye decides to view her alone time as a window of opportunity. She's already taken a look around the common areas - the kitchen, the living room - but she hasn't yet seen inside "his" room. Are there weapons there? Communication devices? Surveillance equipment?

Skye quietly creaks his door open, staying alert for any signs of booby-trapping. She has no idea what's lying beyond the threshold. She half-expects something like a bed of nails or an aging skeleton dressed in women's clothes.

It's just a room, though. Skye finds herself weirdly disappointed. There's a bed, a dresser, and a small desk under the window. Everything is as plain and undecorated as the rest of the house.

Skye takes a step closer to the desk, because it has books and a few papers scattered across it, and she sees that one of the volumes is bright orange and bearing the title _Terremotos Comprensión_. There's a stamp on it that says UNIVERSIDAD DE PUERTO RICO.

Earthquake expert _her ass_. He doesn't know any more than she does. She reaches for the book, intending to flip through it and see what else it says, and that's when she notices the man in the corner.

He's tall, taller than Ward, and he stands quietly in the shadows, not moving or making a sound. He's wearing a nondescript shirt and khakis. He's looking right at her.

He doesn't have any eyes.

"Hello," he says, smiling faintly. "Nice to see you again."

*

Skye jerks awake all at once, breathing loud and fast like she'd just run a marathon. The cottage is dark and still. Her dream slips through her fingers even as she struggles to hold onto it, because she knows, somehow, that it's important, but the harder she tries to remember - a man? a room? - the more the memory fades.

Eventually she swings herself out of bed, feet cool on the wooden floor. She needs a glass of water. There are aspirin in the medicine cabinet too; she'll get three or four or eight of them.

Ward is sitting in the living room when she enters. She pauses, wondering if she really wants to cross the room into the kitchen if that means having to talk to him, and then he looks up and notices her. He doesn't say anything. There's a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, but it's three quarters full.

"What?" she asks, feeling strangely vulnerable with her bare feet and sleep-muddled hair.

"Nothing," Ward says. He breaks eye contact and gestures at the glass. "Want some?"

"Probably a bad idea," she says, "what with my unstoppable powers and all." But she perches on the end of the couch anyway. The dream is still lingering on the edge of her consciousness, and if she could just remember it, she'd know why she's feeling so unsettled -

"Bad dream?" Ward asks, with that uncanny knack of knowing exactly what she's thinking.

"No," Skye says immediately, out of sheer reflex of denying Ward what he wants. Then she reconsiders, tucking her feet underneath her legs, reaching for the alcohol after all. "You know what? Yeah. Yeah, I had a nightmare."

She takes a big swig of whiskey straight from the bottle. Ward raises his eyebrows but doesn't stop her.

"Wanna talk about it?" he asks.

"Wanna tell me why you're sitting in the dark like a creeper?"

Ward looks at his glass. He lifts it, takes a swallow, and sets it back down again, all without saying a word. He's clean-shaven, but a long day has given him whiskers.

"You locked your door," he says evenly.

"Yeah, I did," Skye replies, without an ounce of guilt. _Maybe I'll take what I want._

Ward doesn't quite grimace, because they both know it would be a fake tell. A year ago she wouldn't have known it was fake. A year ago he would have grimaced and sold the lie. She wonders, not for the first time, how many tricks he still has up his sleeve that she doesn't know about, how many ways he could be manipulating her unnoticed.

"I want to apologize for that," Ward says, and now she _is_ surprised. "I didn't mean - no," he stops himself. "I did mean it, but not in the way it sounded."

"You only kinda wanted to rape me," Skye says, voice completely neutral, and Ward really does grimace this time, and she can't tell if it's real or fake or what.

"I would never do anything to hurt you," he says. He turns to face her, and she grips the whiskey bottle a little tighter without conscious thought; his eyes flick down and back up again, and lines of distress wrinkle his forehead. "Skye, I would never," he says vehemently. "I would rather die than force myself on you. What I said that day, I was thinking - well, I thinking of throwing you over my shoulder and just taking you away from SHIELD - "

"You should quit while you're ahead," Skye says.

Ward looks pained. She takes another drink.

"I wanted to run away with you," he says. "That's all I meant. I wanted to take you somewhere else until you understood how I felt, how much you mean to me - "

Skye gets up and leaves. She takes the bottle with her. Ward watches every step like she's just crossing the room, like she's going to stop and turn around at any moment, but she keeps going beyond the threshold and into her own bedroom, closing the door behind her.

She locks it.

Ward never brings it up again.

*

Things are slightly rocky between them the next day, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that things never stopped being rocky between them. This time, though, Skye has a wicked hangover from nursing whiskey late into the night, and Ward disappears before the crack of dawn to go commune in the woods or whatever. It's implicitly clear there will be no training today. That's fine. Skye is starting to wonder if this whole thing is just an impossible fantasy anyway.

 _I think you can do anything you set your mind to_ , Ward had told her. And she'd been so hopeful, the thought of the team shimmering in front of her, the one home she thought would always be there.

Mary Sue Poots should know better.

The whole morning passes like this, Skye working herself deeper and deeper into a funk. The only thing that almost gets her out of bed is the thought she could go snooping, looking in Ward's room for any weapons or communications devices or surveillance equipment. The thought sits strangely in her mind, though, and the hangover doesn't subside until mid-afternoon, so she just lays around doing nothing instead.

At one point Ward takes the car and disappears for a few hours. When she hears him return, she spends several minutes wondering if he's given her up, if HYDRA is about to burst through the front door and haul her away.

When she realizes she doesn't care - that the thought of HYDRA coming after her inspires only a weary acceptance - she forces herself to rise from her nest of blankets. No more whiskey. No more self-pity. They're too dangerous when combined.

Ward is outside making a lot of noise, so she winds up marching in his direction out of sheer single-minded determination to get out of her head. She finds him straddling a wooden bench and sanding something by hand. He glances at her as she approaches, then returns his attention to his work, and she spends a moment just watching him, his eyes serious and intent, the muscles of his arms flexing rhythmically as he sands the wood in long, pressing strokes.

"What are you doing?" she eventually asks.

"Making a chair."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

He has her there. Why not? She copes with emotional turmoil by wallowing in bed all day; maybe he deals by making chairs. It wouldn't be the worst thing she ever learned about him.

"How do you know how to do that stuff?" she asks. "Did they teach it at the SHIELD academy?"

Ward continues sanding. "No," he says.

"High school?"

"No."

"Then where?"

"I lived in the woods for awhile," he says.

Skye blinks, a little nonplussed. "Your family was like the Kennedys." When Ward doesn't respond, she adds, "You grew up in a _mansion_."

"I did," Ward agrees, hands steadily working the wood, sandpaper wrapped around a block that makes a measured noise, _swish-swish-swish_.

Skye waits for a moment, but he doesn't offer anything else.

"Soooooo...?" she prompts.

Ward gives up and lays the block to the side, a careful, precise gesture. Then he sits up straight, dust and little wood flakes falling off his black shirt. "Have you read my file?" he asks, looking at her sideways.

"You aren't that interesting," she replies. The truth is she'd tried, way back when she'd first learned his true colors and had been reeling, hurting, and desperate for an explanation. She'd hacked into SHIELD's servers and found a veritable treasure trove of names, dates, missions, prebriefs, debriefs, assignments, assessments, and psychological profiles, all of them somehow related to Ward.

The problem, she'd realized, is that they had all these documents on him, all this information, and none of it had predicted his disloyalty. Not a single file had warned _this man is going to break your heart_.

She'd shut her laptop after that, files untouched.

Looking at Ward across from her now, she asks, "What am I missing?"

His lips quirk. "Not much," he says. "But the most important part is that I tried to burn down my family's house when I was sixteen."

Skye stares. Ward watches her absorb the news with that odd little smile still in place.

"I'd been planning it for months. I had matches, accelerant. I went under the cover of darkness and put a ring around the entire house. I thought my plan was foolproof, but then my brother saw me from an upstairs window." He makes an expression like _c'est la vie_. "So they hauled me off to a juvenile detention center."

Skye doesn't know whether to run, pull out her firearm, or just sit down for awhile and refuse to think. "Why did you do that?" she asks, but even as she says it she knows the answer.

"Christian." Ward pauses. "Well, all of them, really. But mostly Christian."

His creepy smile is finally gone, but now Skye wishes it would come back, because at least then she's on the firm ground that Grant Ward is a psycho. Now he's leaning back on the bench, his legs stretching out in front of him, and he seems so damn _relaxed_ that she isn't at all sure how to proceed with this conversation. A few months ago he couldn't even talk about his older brother without freaking out. The mere mention of his name turned Ward into a restless animal, pacing his cell and rubbing at his face. Did killing him really bring Ward so much peace?

"How long were you in juvie?" she asks, just to have something to say.

"A couple days. Not long."

"You only got a couple days for arson and attempted murder?" Skye asks in disbelief.

Ward isn't looking at her at all. "Garrett sprung me."

Of course. All roads lead back to John Garrett.

"Let me guess," Skye says. "He made you an offer you couldn't refuse." She isn't actually angling for an argument, but her tone is sarcastic anyway, because she can't seem to turn off her disdain around Ward anymore.

Ward surprises her, however, by shaking his head. "I had a choice." He raises his eyes, staring at the sky or maybe the branches above him, the sunlight filtering through the leaves. "I made the wrong one."

Skye lets that statement settle. It's peaceful here, green and vibrant, and when the wind is right she can even smell flowers from somewhere within the woods. She hears birds through her window when she wakes up in the morning. Ward's vibrations are calm and still, no signs of deception at all.

"So how does this lead to living in the woods?" she eventually asks, with a normal tone. The serenity of the environment seems to have cast a spell over her. She still feels all the regular things about Ward, anger and resentment and betrayal, but they aren't quite as much at the surface anymore, like she's going to burst out of her clothes and turn into the Hulk if he says one more stupid thing. She feels like she's having a real conversation with him for the first time in awhile.

"It was part of my training," Ward explains. "I had to survive in the wilderness by myself. Find my own food, build my own shelter, that kind of thing."

"How long were you out there?"

"Five years."

"Five _years?_ " she echoes.

"Garrett came by every once in awhile," he offers, like that makes it better. "Brought me some stuff. Took the dog to the vet. When I turned 21, we drank a six pack together, and afterward he told me I was ready to rejoin civilization."

Skye honestly has no idea what to do with this information. It isn't the scavenging she objects to, because there were a few dark periods in her own past when she slept in her van and washed furtively at public restrooms, but... she was still in the heart of society. There were always computers and subways and _people_ nearby. She can't even imagine being unplugged for five years. And she's pretty sure she would blow her brains out if she had no one to talk to but John Garrett.

There's also another, smaller part of her pointing out _hey, one mystery down, good job_. Ward is at home in the woods because the woods _have_ been home.

She thinks of a teenage Ward living off the land, silent, alone.

She thinks of a grown Ward wanting to "take her away" to a place where things made sense.

"You're pretty messed up," she says, but without malice. Ward doesn't seem to be bothered either way.

"I'm a survivor," he replies. She remembers a different day, one she spent handcuffed to a railing, when he'd said the same thing.

Then he looks at her and says, "You are too."

Skye watches him stand up and dust the flakes off his shirt. She chooses her next words with care. "You say _survivor_ ," she ventures, slowly, "but it seems to me like it really means 'the only person left standing when everyone else is dead.' And I don't see how that's something to be proud of, or something to fight for."

"Would you rather be dead with them?" Ward asks.

"Maybe I should be."

"Maybe I should be too," he replies.

"Great," Skye says. "Glad everything's cleared up. Let's go die."

Ward smiles for real that time. "Sorry. I failed philosophy at the academy. I'm not good at these kinds of conversations."

"You _failed_ philosophy?" Skye asks, and for one bright, shining moment, she forgets all about death and betrayals and Nazis, because _Ward failed a class_ and that is _hilarious_. The glee takes her completely by surprise, and though she ruthlessly squashes it as soon as she notices it, Ward's smile widens and she knows he totally saw.

"No, I didn't," he says. "I was just trying to make you feel better. I never failed anything. Super-spy, remember?"

And he takes his leave of her, turning and walking back to the cottage, light-footed and _totally full of shit_.

Skye crosses her arms across her chest and does a quick perimeter scan, looking for entry, exit, and vantage points, trying to settle herself back in familiar rhythms. This little adventure isn't at all turning out the way she expected. She needs to remember her mission, her purpose for being here. She can't afford to think about things like flowers and jokes and truths shared in sunlight. She'll be damned if she lets her guard down after all this time.

Perimeter scan complete, she starts to follow Ward back to the cottage, but then she notices the tree stump out of the corner of her eye -

\- and she smiles, completely helplessly, at the googly eyes on the watermelon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I did okay with Schrodinger's rape threat. Comments and critiques are both welcome.


	7. Chapter 7

Things get better after that.

Nothing is _okay_ ; nothing could possibly be okay. But Skye finds herself waking up in the morning and not hating the thought of existence. Instead she makes Ward steal her a laptop, and with some creative piggybacking of cables, devices, and illegal satellite technology, she gets them connected to the internet. From there the days are filled with research: earthquakes, seismic waves, the science behind vibration and sound and energy. Her mind swirls with terms like "vibrokinesis" the same way it used to overload with programming languages, and sometimes it even feels like she's working for the Rising Tide again, staying up late until her head hurts and her vision blurs because she has a project to complete, something meaningful to do.

She doesn't try any practical experiments. She passes the googly-eyed watermelon every day, but she isn't ready to face it again.

"How do you know?" Ward asks.

"Because I look at it and want to vomit," she replies.

So the watermelon stays on the stump and they continue their research, day in and day out, until they're both earthquake experts, capable of carrying on serious debates about plate tectonic theory.

Ward inevitably wins, because he always says "there's an easy settle to settle this," but Skye isn't fucking ready, okay?

Eventually she looks around herself and realizes she's fallen into a routine with Ward. The knowledge sits strangely in her stomach, because she never thought she'd experience that again after their old habits on the Bus were interrupted forever. But life goes on, albeit with more sore sports and sideways glances than before. Skye still wears her gun on her thigh. Ward still looks at her sometimes like he's waiting for something she'll never give. This doesn't stop them from drinking their coffee black and silently trading off the dishes.

They both rise at 5:30am on the dot, and don't talk about it.

*

"I love surprises," Skye says. "Oh, wait, I totally don't."

Ward smoothly changes lanes. "It's nothing bad. It's nothing dangerous. I just don't want you to get any preconceived notions about what it's going to be like."

"I don't do that," Skye objects.

"'Bang,'" Ward quotes, without looking away from the road.

Skye makes a face. The scenery outside changes from green to gray. They're headed north, she knows that much, and they're surrounded by cars and commuters and other signs of a busy morning in the city, so she's _pretty_ sure Ward isn't selling her out to their enemies or preparing a shotgun marriage to be witnessed by Nazis and a few stray Puerto Ricans. Still...

"Can you at least give me a hint?" she asks. "Because my trigger finger doesn't like surprises either."

"You won't need a gun," he says patiently, so she doesn't tell him she brought three.

She wants to go back to the safehouse. The realization is kind of embarrassing but not that surprising. Despite all odds, it's become a home of sorts, a place of refuge filled with the comforting familiarity of her and Ward's shared life together. The living room holds weapons, wrappers, stray clothes, print-outs about earthquakes. The kitchen holds Ward's disgusting pickles and a weirdly addictive banana snack Skye buys by the armful. The walls are solid and strong.

"You didn't leave the oven on, did you?" she asks abruptly. "Because you do that. I've noticed."

Ward glances over. Skye realizes she's drumming her fingers on her thigh. She makes herself stop.

"We're almost there," he says.

"About time."

"I know you're uneasy," Ward continues, in that irritating way he has. "But everything's going to be okay. You just have to - "

"Don't say _trust me_ ," Skye says, and mercifully, he doesn't. He's gotten better about that. There used to be a time when he threw out ridiculous promises and platitudes no matter how much they made her angry, but ever since she almost made his head explode, he's been much more well-behaved.

They eventually pull into a parking lot, and Skye analyzes her surroundings with a trained eye. No buildings. No places for hidden snipers. There are only a few vehicles around; she's pretty sure she can break into that Nissan if she needs a getaway car. SHIELD protocol twelve: _Always have an exit strategy._

She takes a steadying breath, and that's when she smells it: salt water. Skye cocks her head to the side. "Is that the ocean?" she asks.

"The Caribbean sea," Ward corrects.

"You brought me to the _beach_?" Skye has a sudden horrible suspicion there's a picnic basket in the trunk.

Ward rolls his eyes and gets out of the car. "Humor me, please," he calls from out of her sight.

Skye wavers a second, but the "please" does it in the end. Ward isn't a "please" kind of guy, not in between issuing orders and making assumptions, and the fact he's using it now means he's at least trying to build new habits. Skye had a puppy once. She understands the power of positive reinforcement. She climbs out of the car, hair swinging behind her, using her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

And then she sees the sea.

Not only is it big and blue and beautiful, the water stretching out as far as the horizon will take it, but she can also _see all its vibrations_ , a great mass of sparkling particles that dot the surface of the sea like jewels. The tide is lapping gently at the coast, water coming in and out, leaving some particles behind and taking more with it. It's like the entire sea is made of crystals being pushed to and fro. They look real enough to scoop up in her hands like treasure.

Skye isn't sure how long she stands there, rooted to the spot with wonder, but eventually Ward asks, "Do you want to get closer?"

His voice sounds far away. Skye nods, not taking her eyes off the water. She's dimly aware of Ward taking her arm and leading her down a set of steps.

The sea shimmers even more brightly as it comes into full view. She also starts picking up on more than just surface-level abstractions: there's _life_ below the surface, little pulses of movement that must be fish, gentle waves of vibrations that might be seaweed or maybe algae swaying with the tide. When a seagull swoops down and skims the surface of the water, it creates a silver line of fire that has a ripple effect of vibrations shooting in all directions.

"What do you see?" Ward asks.

It doesn't even occur to her to lie. "Particles," she says. "Or - or vibrations. Molecules. Whatever you want to call them. They're _everywhere_ , Ward," she adds, voice just a bit thunderstruck. "There are _thousands_ of them, and I can feel them all - I think that's a _dolphin_ over there, or maybe a shark - "

She can't see it, but it's a smooth, sleek mass moving in the deeper blue, the vibrations flowing through the water like they belong there.

"What does it feel like?"

"I don't know." It's the truth; she's never felt anything like this before. "But I can tell you there's a wave coming. Look."

She points to a distant part of the sea, indistinguishable from the rest, except she can feel the gathering of force in the water, can say with absolute certainty that something is building to a crescendo. It reminds her of code, somehow, the way it cascades down the screen, fluid and gorgeous and completely unstoppable. When she gets in the zone, every line of script feels like something flowing out of her fingertips and appearing like magic on the screen. This is much of the same.

Skye feels alive, deliriously alive, breathless with it. As she watches, the wave swells, crests, and breaks, its particles shimmering like a thousand clouds that eventually go under and out of sight.

This is _incredible_.

"Thought you might like it," Ward says, sounding pleased.

*

She eventually drags him into the sand, abandoning her socks and shoes on the sidewalk so she can get closer to the water. Skye stands before the tide and lets it lap over her feet again and again, marveling at its glittery surface, the way its vibrations touch her so briefly and then go back into the sea. Her powers are responding to it as well, but for the first time, she isn't afraid of their presence. They aren't overwhelming her or making her struggle for control. It's more like - like they're attuned to something, a _part_ of something, ebbing and flowing in harmony with one of the most natural rhythms in the world.

"I thought we might try something," Ward says, after a long while of companionable silence. He's left his socks and shoes behind as well, and rolled up his pants to his calves. He looks ridiculous. It isn't a bad look for him.

"Try what?" Skye asks lazily. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow.

"Using your gift."

Skye raises her eyebrows but doesn't feel any particular alarm. God, the beach is the _best_. She feels syrupy and content all over. "You didn't bring the watermelon," she points out.

"It occurred to me that asking you to be destructive wasn't the best way to stop you from fearing your destruction," Ward says. "You'll need to master combat tactics eventually, but." He shrugs. "Baby steps."

"What exactly am I supposed to do?"

"It's your show. What do you feel like doing?"

Skye gives this some thought, wiggling her toes in the sand. "I could use a nap," she says honestly, and Ward looks like he's biting the inside of his cheek.

"I think maybe you're a little too relaxed."

"Nahhh."

"What's eight times eight?" he challenges.

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. "More than eight," Skye replies.

Ward is definitely laughing at her now. "Wake up, rookie," he says, and before she can reply, he ducks down and splashes some water at her.

It doesn't hurt, of course, but the shock is like a thousand tiny buzzes, the particles of the water connecting with her skin like an electrical charge. Skye gasps a little, and Ward straightens, expression morphing in an instant, saying, "What - "

"Do that again," Skye demands.

Ward looks dubious, but he sends another splash her way. This time she's ready for it, can track the vibrations of the water as they sail across the air, can think to herself:

if (water == "contact")  
{  
water.splash();  
}

And it _does_ , it does exactly what it's supposed to, just like any program she's hacked or infiltrated or reconfigured in the past ten years because _she is the master commander and all systems are her bitches_. Skye feels a smile stretching across her face. Ward is watching her with concern, like she's suddenly going to start laughing hysterically and threatening him again, but she's never felt better in her life.

"Damn right it's my show," she says, and then she raises her palms and pushes.

The water responds swiftly and easily. There's no danger, no fight. It conforms to her power like it conforms to any system input, rushing out into the greater sea as she thinks _out, out, out_.

Then she tells it _in, in, in,_ and it comes back just as surely. She's going against the tide now; it's trying to draw the water away from her unnatural tug. She thinks _override_ and holds it steady, a collection of gems sparkling under the sunlight.

It's the easiest thing in the world. What's more, it feels right. She's using her powers and her entire body is humming with it, like taking a badly-needed stretch with all of her muscles all at once.

This is _awesome_.

Eventually she remembers Ward by her side, and when she glances at him, she sees something breathtaking on his face. There's surprise, certainly, and a little bit of awe, but more than anything he's looking at her like she hung the moon, like she's the most amazing thing she's ever seen, like he -

Like he really -

*

"Are you hungry?" Ward asks later.

They're walking the beach, shoes still forgotten on a sidewalk somewhere. Skye is trying to keep her eyes off the water. It's harder than it should be, especially when she can sense a wave building or a school of fish swimming nearby. It's almost like the sea is talking to her, saying >>>alert("wave") and >>>alert("Nemo!") at every opportunity.

Looking at the water also keeps her from looking at Ward, so it's a difficult temptation to resist.

"Skye?" prompts the man in question. He's matching her pace exactly, even though his long legs could be making much larger strides. Skye hates that he's doing that. She hates that she notices it at all.

"I'm fine," she says.

"You haven't eaten all morning," Ward counters. "And you've just used a lot of energy. We should go back to the car. I have food in the trunk."

>>>alert("PICNIC")

"I'm _really_ not hungry," she says, probably a bit ungracious, because he lets the subject drop. Did she hurt his feelings?

Does she care?

They walk for awhile without speaking. The beach is filling up now, couples and families and joggers. A dog goes off-leash, bounding excitedly through the sand as his owner yells and laughs. When Skye looks over, Ward is smiling.

A frisbee crosses their path at one point, and her heart does double-time. She isn't afraid of crowds or anything, but they definitely make her wary, because all she has to do is close her eyes for the death toll to start looming. It never leaves her alone, a constant specter hovering over her shoulder and just waiting to descend. Unbidden, she thinks of how many people an earthquake would kill at this very moment, on this very shore. She decides to veer towards the cliffs and leave the main beach to the normal people.

"I should've brought something for the sun," Ward says, misunderstanding her intentions as she ducks into the shade. She makes a noncommittal noise. It's scorching outside, but she feels cold all over.

Ward frowns. Skye realizes that she has goosebumps on her arms, that he's noticed. She does not want this conversation at all.

"Wanna go ask those people if we can borrow their sunscreen?" she asks, nodding at random to another family beneath the cliffs. There are four of them, two parents and two little girls. "I bet they have the good stuff," Skye babbles. "With two young kids and all."

"I think we should talk about why you're two seconds away from a panic attack," Ward says, with his S.O. face.

"I'm not panicking," Skye replies. "Or attacking."

"Could've fooled me."

"Is that supposed to be hard?"

"Skye - "

"Did you know I had a sister once?" she asks, the words out of her mouth before she can stop them.

Ward looks thrown. "I thought you were a foster kid?"

"Yeah," Skye says. "She wasn't really my sister. But I wanted her to be."

Ward's eyes are boring into hers, doing that intense thing where he's obviously trying to see inside her soul. For a long second, she has absolutely no idea what he's going to do next. Then he asks, "What happened?"

"The same thing that always happened," Skye says. "It wasn't a good fit." Amazing how it still hurts to hear those words even after all these years. "What confused me," Skye adds, "is that it _was_ a good fit. Or at least I thought it was. The parents liked me, Yo Yo liked me. But they - " She shrugs one shoulder, a jerky motion. "Well, they helped me pack my things and seemed really sorry about it. I guess it wasn't their fault, looking back. What with SHIELD always wanting me reassigned. I just thought..."

She trails off. Ward fills the gap. "You thought you'd finally found a home."

"Something like that."

"How old were you?"

"Eleven."

"So this was after the Brodys," Ward says, and somehow she isn't surprised that he remembered one stray detail of her past she'd told him over a year ago. She nods. "Must've been tough," he offers.

"Nothing is permanent," Skye replies. She thinks of her bunk at SHIELD headquarters, all her stuff still lying there, her bed still unmade. Her sweater draped over the back of a chair.

_Hoping for something and losing it hurts more than never hoping for anything._

"They'll take you back, Skye," Ward says.

She looks at the family again. The girls have gotten out plastic shovels and buckets.

"They will," he insists, when she doesn't reply. She just watches the girls, their heads ducked together, the beginnings of a sandcastle appearing before them. Their vibrations aren't any different than anyone else's. Skye feels like they should be, somehow. Like the pure and untainted energy of children should be different than the ugly energy that precedes gunshots and earthquakes. But the universe doesn't make such distinctions.

"I killed a little girl," she says after awhile.

"I know," Ward replies.

"Her name was Maria."

"I know," he says again, his voice entirely unchanged. They could be talking about the weather. She waits for him to say something like _it wasn't your fault_ or _I'm sorry that happened_ , but he doesn't. He just accepts it.

"How do you sleep at night?" she asks, the wind whipping her hair around her face as the sea crashes at a distance. "After everything you've done? How do you deal with it?"

Ward looks out at the water. He can't see the vibrations, and Skye is already forgetting what the world looked like without them. How do things appear to a man like Ward? The sea without its tossing, churning potential, the children without their bright energy sparking in the air? Does everything look dull and dead?

"I'm trying to be better," Ward says at last, the words coming slowly.

"Does that help?"

Skye can see the exact moment he chooses to be honest. "I don't know. But it's something. It's a solution. I can't go back and change the past, but I can do good things now." He hesitates, then adds, "Maybe one day I'll be able to tip the scales in the right direction again."

It is, she thinks, the exact answer she'd expect a specialist to give. Pragmatic. Results-oriented.

Completely cold-blooded.

"Are you even sorry?" she asks, thinking of the way he'd invoked Fitz as a training exercise, the way he'd calmly told her he'd never been brainwashed. Then she shakes her head and she says, "Wait. Never mind. Don't answer that."

Because she doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to hear him say _no_ and have all her worst fears confirmed.

She doesn't want to hear him say _yes_ and feel even more conflicted than she does now.

Skye finds herself looking at the family again, the sisters now squabbling over a moat. She thinks about Yo Yo and the games they'd played. The way she'd cried bitter tears when she was sent back to the orphanage yet again. It was around that time, she knows, that she decided to find her real parents. Her search took off in earnest during her teens, a desperate, lonely thing that involved a lot of dead ends and bad decisions.

She thinks of a sixteen-year-old Ward alone in the wilderness. When she was sixteen, she was going through a rebellious phase filled with cheap beer and code, thinking she was like Neo in the Matrix, hooking up with anyone who understood her Linux jokes because she thought it meant they had a connection. She usually woke up by herself, the guys having peeled off in the night.

It's strange to realize she and Ward were both alone in the world at the same time.

"I don't forgive you," Skye says, because it seems important he knows that.

"I don't expect forgiveness."

"You've said that before, but actions speak louder than words."

"Why?" Ward asks. "Because I'm helping you? I would've done that before. And I'll do it in the future, whenever you need me. I don't care whose insignia I'm wearing or what Raina or Coulson or any of them think. I don't give a damn how many earthquakes you start. I'll still be here for you. Always."

_Hoping for something and losing it..._

"I wish I could believe you," Skye says, with a lump in her throat.

"You can," Ward says immediately. "I promise. I _promise_ , Skye."

_I don't buy into your promises_ , Skye wants to say, but her heart is suddenly pounding hard. Ward is staring at her, his hair sticking out a little, his feet covered in sand. He looks real, more real than anything else in her life for the past few weeks, when she'd realized she was living in a comic book with magical cocoons and unexplained powers and good friends falling into ash.

She feels dizzy. Her blood is a roar in her ears.

"I promise," Ward says again, voice soft. The vibrations over his heart are going haywire.

Skye can't respond. The ability to speak has completely left her. And then Ward raises a hand. His fingers are curled, his thumb out; it's a casual gesture, one he's made a thousand times when her hair used to come unbound during training. He's going to touch her. He's going to touch her, and he's moving slowly, so slowly, giving her plenty of time to move or jerk away.

She doesn't.

He brushes her bangs out of her eyes. A few strands fall back, softly. His knuckles graze her cheek, and his touch is so light on her skin that it would barely exist if not for the warmth blazing in its wake. Skye feels hot, feverish, magnetized. She feels every particle of his movements, the kinetic energy in his body held in check as he touches her so gently. Her powers say _hello, hello_. Her heart says _please_.

She pulls back, then, just a hair, but Ward takes the hint. His hand drops slowly, unwillingly.

"We should be getting back," she says, voice hoarse.

"Okay," he replies. But he doesn't move.

It's up to her to walk away, turning around and trekking through the sand, her feet strangely heavy. Ward follows in silence. They leave it behind, all of it, the kids and the beach and the unsaid words.

Behind them, the sandcastle grows just a little bit higher.

*

A few days later, Skye is standing in front of the watermelon again. It isn't doing so well. She doesn't know if watermelons can go bad, but this one is withering from time or the sun or maybe both. The googly eyes are still attached, but now they seem weirdly mournful, giving a human face to a sagging and squishy skin.

_I can do this_ , Skye thinks. Ward is inside. His head is safe.

She raises one palm. Her powers boot up as eagerly as ever, but this time, instead of clamping them down, she tries to accept the flood of energy and potential and adrenaline moving within her body.

_This is okay_ , Skye tells herself. _This is natural. The flow of the tide. The scrolling of a computer screen._

She lets everything swirl for a minute, acclimating herself to the feeling until she feels like she has it under control. Then she thinks:

function explodeMelon (levelPower)  
{  
if (levelPower == explodeMelon)  
{  
alert("You've blown up the watermelon! Good job!");  
}  
else if (levelPower [ explodeMelon)  
{  
alert("This isn't enough power to blow something up. Try again?");  
}  
else if (levelPower ] explodeMelon)  
{  
alert("You appear to be blowing up someone's brain. Do you really wish to proceed?");  
}  
}

_Y_ , Skye thinks, _Y Y Y Y Y_ , because the watermelon has started wobbling. Her palm is shaking too, but that's okay. She's got this. They're just molecules, that's all. Little atoms vibrating like beads of water on a string. All she has to do is reach out and scatter them, and then the watermelon will explode, one command unleashing an entire string of results. Piece of cake.

She takes a deep breath, feeling her powers rise with the oxygen, her entire body held on an inhale. She zooms in on the watermelon. One command and then -

"Hey, Skye?" Ward calls from inside the cottage, and the watermelon jerks off the stump and falls to the ground.

Mother _fucker_.

"This had better be the most important thing you've ever said to me _in your life,_ " she says, and there's a long, guilty pause.

"I wanted to show you something?" Ward asks, making it a question.

Skye lets out an irritated breath. Well, nothing for it now. "Just a second," she says, and decides to make herself a cup of coffee before dealing with Ward and his terrible timing and his terrible everything.

When she steps into his room, mug in hand, she feels a bit calmer. Less likely to unhinge her jaw and swallow his head out of sheer frustration, anyway. She finds him sitting on the edge of his bed in front of a rocking chair, a large, handsome thing made of some kind of dark wood that's been polished to a shine.

"I finished it," he says. "I thought I might get your opinion on it."

"It's a chair," she says.

"Excellent observation, rookie. Want to take a seat?"

"Nope."

"Do it anyway."

Skye wonders briefly if it will grow chains and bind her there like in Harry Potter, but curiosity prevails and she sits down anyway. Then she realizes why Ward asked her to do it. The weight distribution is all wrong; she can rock, but it feels weird, weighted, like -

'You've stuffed something in it," she says.

"Nothing but dirt for now," Ward says, "but you can put anything you want in there. Blades, flares, ammo, garrotte wire. Your enemy would have no idea."

"That's pretty cool," Skye admits, and he looks smug. "Do you think our satellite cables would fit?"

"One way to find out," Ward says.

Skye hops up, coffee mug still in hand, intending to retrieve them from her room. That's when she spies something orange out of the corner of her eye.

_Terremotos Comprensión_.

It's half-hidden on the desk, covered in papers and a single, solitary gun, and for a second Skye can only blink as memory floods into her with full force.

Then she whirls back around to Ward, dropping the coffee mug as unimportant. He's on his feet before it even hits the floor.

"We have to get out of here," she says.

He grabs his gun, then reaches under the bed and unlatches several knives. "Why?" he asks as he moves, tucking the gun into the back of his pants, sliding his knives into his boots.

She's moving too, out into the living room where she's hidden several disposable cells. "I've been having these dreams," she says, grabbing a backpack, cramming their notes into it. "I thought they were just nightmares, but unless my subconscious randomly decided to give you the sudden and aggravating ability to speak Spanish - "

" _Lo siento_ ," Ward says, passing her a couple of water bottles. She stuffs them in the backpack too.

"Someone's watching us," she explains. "I don't know how - and I mean that literally, I have no idea how he's doing it, because he doesn't have any eyes and it's really creepy - but somehow he knows we're here. The safehouse has been compromised. We need to scram."

"All right," Ward says. "Let me go get my grenades."

"Yeah, and can you also grab - " Skye stops. "What?"

Ward doesn't answer, striding purposefully into the _bathroom_ , of all places, and Skye has the sudden and disconcerting vision of triggering an explosive while peeing. She wouldn't even be the first SHIELD agent to do it. But then Ward comes back with the innocuous brown bag that he'd originally grabbed from the diner, and Skye is past being surprised, she really is. 

"I'm not carrying those, you freak," she says, and goes to open the front door of the cottage -

\- where Simmons is waiting on their doorstep.

Skye stares. Simmons stares.

Then, before Skye can think of a thing to say, Simmons raises a wicked-looking dagger, the edge sharp and glinting in the sunlight.

As Skye stands there, stupidly, uselessly, Simmons stabs her in the chest.


	8. Chapter 8

Lights.

Voices.

Pain.

These things come to Skye through a fog, one that feels so familiar it takes her back to a dark basement and a sick crooning. _Shhh_ , Ian Quinn had whispered, as he shot her and left her to die. The pain had been excruciating, starting in her abdomen and spreading through her entire body like poison, and she'd dragged herself across a dirty floor wishing that someone, anyone, would come through the door just so she wouldn't face the end alone.

"Miss? Miss?"

_I've been stabbed_ , Skye thinks. Her eyelids are heavy. _Simmons stabbed me._

"Miss, can you hear me?"

Wait. That can't be right. Simmons wouldn't -

"Miss?"

Lights. Flickering. She has the vague sense of people moving around her.

" _Tenemos que preparar para la cirugía -_ "

_Oh my God, I'm going to die in Puerto Rico_ , Skye thinks, her last coherent thought, and then everything fades away again.

*

A loud crash brings her back to the land of the living. Skye shoots up straight and reaches for her sidearm before she even registers her settings; she only realizes what she's doing when a sharp, slicing pain goes through her chest, and she clutches it, gasping.

Her hand comes away wet.

There's blood all over her chest. Why is there blood all over her chest? Her shirt has been ripped halfway off, tattered and stained red. What the hell happened?

_Simmons_ , Skye thinks. It takes a second for her to realize why the thoughts are connected.

Simmons stabbed her.

Simmons _stabbed_ her.

Skye sits up slowly, mindful of the pain that starts beating against her ribs as soon as she moves. She's on a gurney, a supremely uncomfortable one, and the florescent lights are a shade of bright usually only found in hell and high school classrooms. No one else is in the hallway with her, though she can hear the sounds of ringing phones and busy people in the distance.

A hospital, then. She's in a hospital.

Because Simmons _stabbed_ her.

She sees the moment again in her mind, Simmons standing there at the doorway, the dagger glinting in the sunlight. She remembers the thrust of Simmons' arm more than the blade itself, the power and ferocity with which she'd jammed the dagger into her chest. She remembers staring at Simmons in shock, too stunned to even defend herself, and she remembers - oh, God - she remembers Simmons _taking the dagger back out_ , yanking it from her chest with savagery, leaving her to crumple like a rag doll.

She remembers the ground rushing up to meet her. She doesn't remember actually hitting it.

_Ward_ , she thinks, with a kind of senseless trust. Ward would be able to explain everything. But where is he?

Skye peers down at her chest. She expects a terrible wound given the pain and the gruesome state of her shirt, but it isn't actually that bad. She can see where the blade went in, two strips of flesh with red gristle between them, but she isn't bleeding anymore, and she can tell that her skin is trying to mend itself. It mostly looks gross and scabby, like...

Like it's healing.

Well, at least her blood isn't blue.

Skye inches her way off the gurney, clutching the tattered remains of her shirt to her chest. She needs to find Ward. Is he doing paperwork somewhere? He must not have realized that she'd be okay; he must have brought her to the hospital in a panic, because Simmons tried to kill her -

No, that's crazy. Simmons wouldn't do that.

Something must be wrong with her.

The idea takes root and spreads. Something happened to Simmons. She isn't herself; something strange is at play; she's been brainwashed by Nazis or enslaved by Asgardians. Hell, maybe it's just something that went kaboom in the lab. They deal with all kinds of freaky things in there, so if Simmons was exposed to another magic rage staff, something that wiped her of all reason, she might have -

_Tracked you down at a safehouse, waited on your doorstep for the opportune moment, and then put a blade between your ribs?_ whispers the little voice in Skye's head.

Another possibility occurs to her, one so awful that she has to steady herself with a hand against the gurney.

She'd never expected Ward to be a traitor, either.

If Simmons -

If Simmons is HYDRA -

Absolutely everything in Skye rejects the idea, even her stomach; it takes a supreme effort of will not to throw up. Simmons can't be HYDRA. She's one of her best friends. She's saved Skye's life a dozen times over, she's protected her and stayed up late with her and made her laugh, she -

She means as much to Skye as Ward ever did.

_No. No. No._

Skye needs to get out of this hospital. That's what she needs to do. She needs to find Ward, and then they can leave together.

Doors burst open at the end of the hallway, and Skye yet again reaches for a gun that isn't there, her habits ingrained too deeply to break. Unfortunately, this means letting go of her shirt, and it gapes open to reveal her horror movie chest.

The man in the white coat gapes, too.

"Uh," Skye says. "Hola?"

"You shouldn't be up," the doctor says, in slow, disbelieving English. "How are you up?"

"Your hospital really did the trick?" Skye tries. "Excellent care. Five stars." She holds up five fingers.

"You were dying!" the doctor insists. "The blade missed your heart by millimeters!"

Skye frowns. "So what, you decided to leave me in the hallway?"

"This is - " the doctor starts, but however he would've described the situation is lost forever, because that's when there's a familiar buzzing noise, a bright blue light, and he drops to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

May stands behind him and tucks the ICER back into her belt.

"Come on," she says into the sudden and all-consuming silence. "We need to get moving."

Skye's brain is processing but there are no commands connecting it to the mainframe. May strides past her, looking the same as ever with her black leather jacket and gun holstered to her thigh, her movements focused and purposeful. She checks a door at the south end of the hall and gestures Skye over. "This stairwell connects to the roof. We'll be able to get to the quinjet from here."

"The quinjet?" Skye echoes mindlessly.

"The quinjet," May confirms.

Skye looks back at the doctor. "He knows," she says. "He saw me heal - " But then she stops, because what does _May_ know about her sudden healing abilities? In fact, how did she know Skye was here at all? Things are moving entirely too fast, and Skye's chest throbs.

May considers her statement, still holding the door open, and then she lets it close. She walks back over to the doctor and maneuvers him out of his white coat. She also musses his hair, unbuckles his belt, and tosses his glasses aside. Then she drags him to another door and stuffs him inside a small room filled with boxes and mops.

"With any luck, he'll be discovered here," she says as she works, "and everyone will think he's been drinking on the job. But even if he wakes on his own, I can't imagine he'll believe his own memories about this. They'll be too surreal."

Then she turns back to Skye.

"Now we can go," she says.

_The Cavalry came for me,_ Skye thinks, and feels affection rushing through her like a wave, so much of it that her eyes are suddenly bright and her heart aches. May has always been a constant in her life, a steady and stalwart protector, a calm at the center of SHIELD's madness. And here she is again, the same as always. The world can go completely to hell; girls can emerge from cocoons and destroy city blocks. May will still knock guys out and hide them in supply closets.

"I don't think I can manage the stairwell," she confesses, because May won't think any less of her for it.

May's eyes scan over her chest like an x-ray. "Are you in pain?"

"Kinda. I did get stabbed. I'd rank it up there with getting shot in terms of awfulness."

May looks at the doors at the end of the hall. "There are elevators by the main desk. We can take them to the top floor. Here." She shrugs out of her jacket, the one that Skye has secretly coveted for their entire acquaintance, and Skye is already reaching for it before her words register.

"I'm not going back to SHIELD," she says.

"It's our only course of action."

"No." She isn't a particularly fearsome image, not with teary eyes and her bra hanging out of her bloodstained shirt, but she'll be damned if she's going to put her friends in danger now, after all the hell she's been through to keep them safe.

May's expression softens just slightly. "I know you're afraid - " she begins.

"I'm crazy, that's what I am," Skye interrupts. "I don't know if you've heard, but I can make earthquakes. I can control the tide. I can see your energy." She waves a hand around May's figure, her vibrations a tight but steady thrum, like a bow strung and ready. "I had a breakthrough, I guess, in the sense that I'm pretty sure I won't blow up people's brains by accident, but that's the extent of my self-control."

If May is alarmed by any of this, she doesn't show it. She waits for Skye to finish speaking, and then she asks, "What if I said we had ways of containing your abilities?"

"What, like Vault D?"

"Coulson would never do that to you," May says, and Skye thinks of padded rooms and scarred wrists, and she feels sick without fully understanding why.

"Have you seen Ward?" she asks.

May is too well-trained to have any tells, but her vibrations go taut. The sick feeling spreads.

"You didn't hurt him," Skye says, and it comes out a warning as much as a plea. May is looking at her and it's completely impossible to tell what she's thinking; maybe she wonders if Skye has turned into a traitor too, and maybe she has, maybe she and Ward and Simmons can all get thrown into adjoining cells; Skye will take it as long as everyone is safe.

"I didn't hurt him," May says. Her face is still impossible to read. "I spotted him leaving the hospital, but you were the priority. There's no telling where he is now."

So he's gone. That's good. Skye tells herself that's good. "What about Simmons?" she asks.

"There hasn't been any sign of her either."

Skye swallows hard. "But you know she - " _Stabbed me. Put a dagger in my chest. Tore it out._ "You know she's out there?"

"Yes."

"Did she say anything, did she - "

"She left headquarters in the middle of the night," May says. "We were a few hours behind her, but we managed to track her to your safehouse." A pause. "The scene told the rest of the story."

Skye feels the loss of her sanctuary like another blow. It's silly, of course; it's nonsensical. But it was a nice cottage. It had strong walls and library books and homemade chairs, and now all she can imagine are broken floorboards and bloodstains in the dirt, SHIELD agents crawling around and touching everything.

Where is she supposed to go now?

May steps forward. "Let me take you back to SHIELD," she says, imploring. "It doesn't have to be permanent. Let's just get together and share intelligence. Maybe we can piece together what's going on and figure out what to do about it."

There's an intense yearning in Skye's chest, a tug so severe it feels almost physical.

"I'm dangerous," she feels compelled to point out.

"If you need to stand down, I'll tell you to stand down," May says.

The truth of this statement is the single most reassuring thing that Skye has heard in months.

"Okay," she says, and just like that she's going back to SHIELD, countless nights of misery and loneliness wiped away in an instant. Is she crazy? She must be crazy. Maybe it's the blood loss. She finds herself smiling at May, and May smiles back, one side of her mouth pushing inward. It's the look she used to give Skye after hours of beating her ass on the mats. Skye would be bruised on her knees and elbows and shins, and May would smile, and put her hand on her shoulder, and say _you're improving_.

"Please don't be leading me into a trap," Skye blurts out. "I'll feel really stupid if this all ends with white rooms and straitjackets."

"We don't have white rooms anymore," May replies. "It's too hard to get blood out of the walls."

And she starts creeping down the hallway, forging a path for Skye to follow.

Skye really did miss her.

*

All things considered, her homecoming is less dramatic than she would've imagined. May pilots the quinjet back to base, and they enter through the main door like she still belongs there. May has to enter the guest code for her since Skye has no idea where her ID is - the ruins of San Juan? the pocket of her old jeans in Anasco? - but even that comes with its own kind of comfort.

She won't be staying permanently. Even if she had complete control of her powers, Skye refuses to stay in a place where she isn't wanted.

Foster kids get complexes like that, and SHIELD is the biggest foster family of them all.

"Ladies," says Hunter, who is lounging against a table and reading what Skye knows to be a mission report. His eyes linger on her as she passes, but he doesn't scream or burst into flames or do anything else crazy because she's back.

May ignores him completely, which is par for the course.

They pass a few techs, and they _do_ have a reaction; Anderson's eyes widen and Cheal actually ducks her head and turns away, and okay, that smarts a little. Cheal was one of hers, a techie who ran background checks and used to regard Skye as the second coming of Jesus and Kevin Mitnick. Her opinion has clearly changed.

Skye reminds herself that she's just a guest here and none of it actually matters.

Coulson rises to meet them when she and May enter his office. He doesn't look any different than usual. More tired, maybe. He'd been called and told they were coming, so he isn't surprised, but his eyes sweep Skye's form the same way May's had, like he's reassuring himself that she has all her limbs and no visible deformities.

"I'll let myself out," May says, and does so.

Coulson waits for the door to close before he speaks. "It's good to see you, Skye."

"You too," Skye replies, hearing Simmons' voice in her head. _There are some concerns, that's all. Points were raised._

"How's the wound?" Coulson asks. May had unearthed another shirt in the quinjet, so she looks respectable, not wild or blood-stained at all. There's absolutely no outward sign of the fact that one of her best friends had just stabbed her, that she could still remember the swooping sensation in her stomach as she fell, a feeling that never ended because she never landed.

"What do you know about Simmons?" she asks, cutting to the chase. She takes a seat in front of the desk and tries not to wince at the twinge of pain that still echoes around her ribs.

It's almost completely healed now. She is the queen of the freaks.

Coulson takes a seat when she does. "She left about 36 hours ago. Middle of the night. No warning." He swings his laptop around to face her, and Skye sees that he's been reviewing security footage. "There's nothing out of the ordinary about her actions before or during her departure. If it hadn't been at 2am, I would've assumed she was going out for coffee."

"Did she have anything on her?"

"The clothes on her back."

"No weapons?" Skye presses. "Or... ?"

"No communication devices," Coulson says, and Skye leans back in her chair, breath leaving in a rush. Undercover agents need orders. They need to speak with their handlers when they make big moves. They don't abandon their posts in the middle of the night with nothing to show for their infiltration.

Simmons isn't HYDRA. Of course she isn't HYDRA.

_Thank fucking God._

Coulson turns the laptop back around. "I was worried too," he offers quietly. "And we can't rule it out entirely. But I'm choosing to classify this investigation as a rescue mission. Our resources, our focus - it's all going to operate on the assumption that something unnatural happened to make her behave so out of character."

"Asgardian magic?"

"Nothing on the scanners."

"Brainwashing?" Skye suggests.

"Whitehall is dead, and it all flowed from him."

"It isn't always a clean break, though," Skye says, thinking of Kara, her conflicted expressions playing out on the wrong face, the way she'd guarded Ward so fiercely because she didn't have any other purpose in life.

Coulson cocks his head to the side. "Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

Skye cocks hers back. "Uh, is there something you'd like to tell _me?_ "

"Come again?" Coulson looks startled.

"You've been following me," Skye points out. She isn't truly angry about it, not when she understands the reasoning behind it, but it's a bit rich for Coulson to sit across from her and allude to secrets when he's one of the biggest secret-keepers of them all. "You knew about the safehouse. You followed me to the motel after I asked you not to - which, by the way, is the same thing that a Nazi wound up doing, so maybe you should rethink that particular policy."

"You've lost me," Coulson admits, expression wary. "We did find you at the motel, but only because we were monitoring San Juan's seismic energy after your first... episode. It was pure luck that you used your powers again so close to where we were staying. As for the safehouse, we tracked Simmons there, and we have no idea how _she_ found you."

"Oh, really?" Skye asks. "So the eyeless dude giving me nightmares, he isn't one of the gifteds on SHIELD's payroll?"

Coulson tenses all at once. "What eyeless dude?"

Skye feels unease slithering up her spine like a snake. "That wasn't you," she says. It isn't a question. Coulson's face tells her everything she needs to know.

"Has someone been dreamwalking with you, Skye?" he asks.

"There's a _name_ for it?" Skye asks, and then shakes her head and runs a hand through her hair. Of course there is. It's SHIELD. They have paperwork for everything from interdimensional aliens to corporeal possession. "Right, okay," she says decisively, standing up. "This was a bad idea. If there really is someone with access to my dreams, it isn't safe for me to be here."

"Or it's the only safe place for you to be," Coulson counters. He stands up too, but takes pains to keep his hands at his sides, a nonthreatening stance. "We can protect you from whatever this is."

"And who will protect you from me?"

"I don't and haven't ever considered that a concern," he says, and maybe it's his calm, measured tone, or maybe it's the fact he used the word _concern_ , but Skye feels her powers lurch. She turns away quickly, willing them to move harmlessly through her and not target anything. That's the key. Don't tamper them down, just let them do their thing. Breathe. Breathe.

"I know you don't want me to be here," she says, when she feels she has control over herself.

"What?" Coulson asks. When she doesn't respond, he comes around the desk and puts himself right in front of her. He looks confused and worried and it's all too much, this expression, this normalcy. Coulson puts on a bland face for the rest of the world but he's never hidden his emotions from her, and now he couldn't even if he wanted to, his vibrations bright and agitated.

"Simmons told me," she says. "Before. She said there were concerns about me coming back."

Coulson's vibrations jump a little. She tries not to read into that and fails.

"All right," he says, after a long and awkward pause. "I guess we're having this conversation."

"I think I'd prefer getting stabbed again."

"Skye," he says, and it's gentle. She looks past him, at his records, the ones she used to play in his office when he wasn't around. She never asked permission, but even after he walked in on her playing _Stomping at the Savoy_ and pecking away at her laptop, he still never locked his door. "Skye, look at me, please," he says.

She does. His gaze is steady, the lines of his face worn and dear to her heart.

"There are concerns," he says. "I won't lie to you. Word of your origins has gotten out, and combined with your sudden and inexplicable powers, some people are uneasy. It's a lot to take in."

"Yeah, it must be really difficult for them," Skye says, before she can stop herself.

Coulson shrugs. "Well, I didn't say it wasn't stupid."

"So what's the scuttlebutt?" she asks. "Do people think I should be tracked down? Hit with a tranquilizer dart? Thrown in a cell?"

"I'm not in the habit of listening to bad ideas," Coulson replies. "If they have opinions, they haven't shared them with me."

Skye digs her nails into the denim of her jeans. "And what's _your_ opinion?" she asks, like it doesn't matter at all, like what he says next doesn't have the potential to shatter her into a million pieces. "Do you think I should be locked away for the good of society?"

"You _are_ the good of society," Coulson says, so matter-of-fact that she thinks she might shatter after all.

He returns to his desk and reclaims his seat. He doesn't say anything, just sits there in front of a million file folders and pens of red, white, and blue. They had been Skye's gift for Boss Appreciation Day. She's pretty sure she could make them explode if she wanted. She could blow them all up with her powers and flee the base like the carnival act she is.

Instead, she takes a seat.

"Did May give you the speech?" Coulson asks.

"What speech?"

"About coming back. How it doesn't have to be permanent, how we're willing to help you however you'll let us."

"Oh," Skye says. "Yeah. I got that."

Coulson gives a rueful smile. "I see it didn't inspire a change of heart. Well, it was a work in progress anyway."

Skye looks at him head-on. "I want to find Simmons," she says, the truth ringing from every word. "I'll do whatever it takes to find her. But I can't promise anything beyond that. I have better control of myself now, but it's still not... I still can't blow up a watermelon." Coulson raises his eyebrows, and she shrugs. "There's a lot you don't know about the freak show."

"So tell me," he suggests.

"Did you miss the part where I said it was a freak show?"

Coulson leans over his desk. "I need to know what you've been doing," he says. "Simmons found you. How? She targeted you. Why? I know you've been with Ward. I'm not going to judge. I'm just asking for any information you have that might bring Simmons safely home."

He says it like Skye has a choice, but she doesn't really. Simmons is out there somewhere, and who knows if she's hungry or cold or frightened, if she realizes what's happening to her or worse, if she isn't aware of it at all, if she's turned into a brainless automaton with none of the real Simmons in control anymore.

Skye takes a deep breath.

"I found Ward with Kara," she begins.

*

Later, she sits in the empty kitchen and eats ice cream right out of the carton. The room is dark, the hour late; sane people have gone to bed. Skye is too exhausted to sleep. She spent the entire afternoon sequestered in Coulson's office while he carefully grilled her on every detail of her story, and while they're no closer to answers than before, she can't deny that a large weight has been lifted off her shoulders.

He knows everything. Well, almost everything. She skimmed over most of the parts with Ward. But he knows about the death toll and the officers at the motel, and he knows her blood saved a life that maybe shouldn't have been saved, and he knows she only barely has a grip on powers she has no hope of understanding.

And he still wants her here.

Suck on that, Cheal.

A shadow falls over the table, and Skye looks up to see Bobbi standing in the doorway. She wonders - she can't help but wonder - _Do you think I'm a monster? Are you one of the people who doesn't want me here anymore?_

But then Bobbi strolls into the kitchen, grabs a spoon from the drawer, and takes a seat next to Skye.

"Hey," she says casually.

"Hey."

"Hope you don't mind if I join you for a minute. Hunter is doing something really stupid with a bottle of tequila and a utility lighter."

Skye smiles. "Knock yourself out. Or, uh, don't, I guess." She gestures awkwardly to all the empty seats around them. She and Bobbi haven't really talked much; if Skye is being honest with herself, part of the reason is because Simmons came back from HYDRA being really tight with her, the two of them in their own little I-survived-undercover-with-the-Nazis-club. It made something in Skye's stomach hurt to see it.

But Simmons is gone now. Gone and alone and under the influence of some terrible magic that's torn her from her team.

Skye takes a determined bite of ice cream.

"Things have gotten kinda crazy, huh?" Bobbi asks. She digs her spoon into the carton. "Alien cities. Wild powers."

"I guess so," Skye says. Her wound itches. It's nothing but scar tissue now, gnarled skin on her chest to match the bullet holes in her abdomen. Her body is slowly turning into a war zone. She wonders if Ward ever feels the same about his own scars, the stitched lines on his wrist and the exit wounds in his chest.

"I know I was freaked out when Mack got possessed," Bobbi says, and Skye, distracted, almost chokes on a hunk of chunky monkey.

"He got _what?_ " she asks.

"You didn't hear?" Bobbi starts fiddling with her spoon in an absent-minded way, turning it over and over again in her fingers. "Something took him over when he went down into the temple. Some kind of force. It used him as a bodyguard for the city."

Skye remembers, suddenly, the black-eyed version of Mack she'd encountered when she first entered the tunnel. Guilt washes through her. How could she have forgotten?

"Is he okay?" she asks. "I mean, he got over it, right?" Coulson had told her the team was fine, he said they were all fine...

"He got over it," Bobbi confirms. Then she lowers her eyes and adds, "I didn't."

Skye wonders if she should ask. Bobbi smiles with no humor whatsoever.

"I'm wallowing in it," she admits. "Pointless, I know. But I can't help it. I had to hurt him when he was... not himself. And now I find it hard to even look in his direction."

"Does he blame you?" Skye asks.

"Not at all." Bobbi looks down at the table, curls falling heavily around her face. "That's the worst part, being forgiven."

In the long silence that follows, Skye realizes she's gripping her spoon so hard her knuckles are white. She makes herself stop. "I forgot you were an interrogator," she says.

Bobbi looks at her sideways. Her expression is both knowing and self-deprecating. "Most people do."

Skye gets up and takes the ice cream back to the freezer. "I don't really want to talk about my feelings," she says, because what could she say? She killed a dozen people and was never punished for it? She's terrified of being locked away in the vaults even though she knows she deserves it? Trip died, Mack was possessed, Bobbi was traumatized, and it was all because of her and her father?

"That's fine," Bobbi says. "You don't have to confide in me. I just want you to know that you can."

"Are you some kind of therapist for young agents?" Skye demands, whirling on her.

Bobbi looks surprised. "What?"

"You and Simmons, and now you and me? Or are you just trying to replace your lapdog now that she's gone?" Skye doesn't know where these accusations are coming from. It's a bad habit of hers, lashing out and regretting it immediately afterwards. She wishes Ward were here. He would take it.

Bobbi is looking at her with too much understanding to be comfortable. "I do try to watch out for Simmons," she says. "I like her. I wouldn't call her a lapdog, though. If anything, she's the master and we're all running around to the crack of her benevolent whip." She stands up and takes her spoon into the sink. "I like you too, for what it's worth," Bobbi adds.

Skye feels her anger deflate as suddenly as it came.

"I'm sorry," she says, and to her horror, she finds herself getting choked up. "It's just - it's just been a really long day."

"I get it," Bobbi replies. She knocks her shoulder against Skye's.

The worst part is that she should've known better. Of course Bobbi is just as cool as Simmons always said she was. Simmons wouldn't be wrong about something like that.

_Simmons_ , Skye thinks, _is a better person than all of us_ , and then she has to fight the urge to just lay down right there on the kitchen floor and hope for another Ian Quinn.

"Bobbi!" comes a call from the hallway. "Where'd you put the bloody - oh. Hey." Hunter stops at the threshold of the room, holding two shot glasses in one hand and a firecracker in the other. Skye hurriedly wipes her eyes, and his gaze flicks from her to Bobbi and back again. "Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt girl time," he says smoothly. "Carry on."

" _Girl time?_ " Bobbi asks scathingly.

"See, why do you take that tone? Why do you always do that?"

"Why do you always give me a reason to have a tone?"

"I was offering to go away!"

"Yeah, so we could have more _girl time_ \- "

"You're girls, you're having a time, that's girl time - "

"So I'm just gonna leave you guys alone," Skye says, pushing herself to her feet, but Bobbi immediately turns on her.

"No! We are finishing our discussion. Hunter was just going to leave."

"Don't have to tell me twice," he says, eyebrows raised to his hairline. He makes a show of walking away, but pops his head back in the room almost immediately afterward. "One last thing, Skye - if you hear any weird noises that sound like, say, an indoor explosion - "

" _Out_ ," Bobbi says, and he retreats for good. She turns to Skye with exasperation still lingering on her features.

"Sorry about that," she says. "I always tell myself I'm not gonna let him get under my skin, and yet..." She makes a crazy face, and the sentiment is so familiar to Skye that she has to smile.

"I know the feeling."

Bobbi's expression is friendly, but now it's considering, too. "Yeah, I guess you would."

Skye very pointedly does not think about Ward. She doesn't think about him carrying her body to the hospital, her blood soaking his clothes. She doesn't imagine him seeing her laid out on a stretcher for the second time in two years. He said he would always be there for her, but then she woke up alone.

Did he see SHIELD on the horizon? Was it self-preservation? Did he watch the quinjet flying away until it faded into a speck in the sky?

Is he out there right now worrying about her too?

Bobbi is still watching her face. "For what it's worth," she says eventually, "I know what it's like to love an idiot."

Skye's head snaps up. There are a thousand things she could say so that, so many that they all collide when she tries to open her mouth, _I don't love him_ mixing with _I don't know what you're talking about_ and _I was only with him because he was helping me with my powers_ and another, smaller part of her wanting to confess _I don't know where he is and it's killing me_.

She wants to say all these things, so she winds up saying nothing, staring at Bobbi with her stomach in knots and her heart aching.

Bobbi offers a smile of her own. This one is real, small, and sad.

"Yeah," she says. "I definitely know those feelings."

*

Later that night, lying in the dark and staring up at the ceiling, Skye thinks about the sea. She thinks about power and energy and the rising tide; she thinks about brown eyes. She thinks about a hand on her cheek, a gentle gesture, as the wind whips through her hair and the waves crash restlessly behind her.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay with this chapter! Since I fell totally behind and let the show catch up to me, I should disclaim that this fic will officially be AU once 2x11 airs. I already have it plotted out, and I don't plan on incorporating future show canon into what I've got going on, so however they choose to explore Skye's powers and introduce the Inhumans... my take will be different. >_>
> 
> As always, thanks to everyone for the support and encouragement! It really means a lot!


	9. Chapter 9

"How's it going?" Bobbi asks, putting a cup of coffee in front of her.

Skye grabs it with both hands and drinks deeply.

"That well, huh," Bobbi says.

Skye makes a frustrated gesture at the laptop. "I've got her going _into_ Anasco," she says. "It isn't exactly a hotbed of digital surveillance, but I managed to scrape together a few videos, enough to figure out she's headed towards our safehouse. But as for where she went after she left?" She puts her nose in her mug. "There isn't enough coffee in the world for all the security footage I've watched," she says, voice muffled.

"Have you checked the airports? Train stations? You might catch her leaving the country."

"I'm running a program," Skye says, not mentioning that she actually just invented it, because the others were too slow and every second that passes is another second Simmons is in the wind.

"You need a break," says Coulson from behind her, nursing a mug of his own. "You've been at it all night. When's the last time you took a breather?"

Skye eyes the bags under his eyes, the wrinkles on the shoulders of his suit jacket. "How's that coffee, AC?" she asks. "Did you add a little hypocrisy with your creamer?"

Bobbi laughs and wanders away, back to her work station in the other room; she's been contacting everyone she knows, every crook and mercenary and weapons dealer, looking for someone who might have sold a black-handled dagger to a young woman three days ago. Skye isn't sure what Coulson's doing, but he's been holed up in his office just as surely as she's been camped in front of her computer.

"I'm serious, you know," he's saying now. "Take a break. Open a window. There are doughnuts in the kitchen."

"Yeah," Skye says.

"Running yourself into the ground won't help Simmons."

"I got it."

Coulson takes a sip of coffee, his shrewd eyes missing nothing. She wonders if he's going to push it; she starts to work up a good rebuttal just in case. But what he comes out with is this: "Fitz needs you for testing later."

Skye tries not to let her body tense or her breathing patterns change.

"It's nothing invasive," Coulson says, reading her body language anyway, or maybe just knowing her that well. "He needs to get some solid facts about your powers, that's all. How much you can do, how long it takes you to do it, that kind of thing."

"I'm not sure that's a great idea," Skye says. She puts down her mug. It rattles. "My powers, they're... unpredictable, and my control over them is still kinda up in the air."

"May said something about a breakthrough?"

"In the sense that I probably won't blow up any more sidewalks."

"Good. It's hard to get renovators out here."

Skye huffs a little, half-amused, half-annoyed. "Is there anything I can do to make you take this seriously?"

"I assure you, Skye, I take the safety of my agents _very_ seriously." He looks down at her with something soft on this face, this ridiculous man with wrinkles in his suit and bags under his eyes from caring too much. "That includes you."

Skye gazes into her coffee. "You know you're not my boss anymore," she points out. "I quit, remember?"

"I refuse to accept your resignation," Coulson replies. "Go eat a doughnut."

*

Fitz comes for Skye later that morning. He, out of everyone, looks the most changed after their time apart; he's growing his hair again, and it curls messy and wild against his scalp, and his chin shows the scruff of several long days. He's wearing his soft gray sweater, his self-comforting one. He's been wearing it a lot since he woke up from his coma.

"Time to be poked and prodded?" Skye asks, hoping to draw a smile.

But Fitz doesn't even look at her. "We'll be measuring your powers with a seismometer," he says to the wall behind her head. "If you'll - if you'll - this way. Come with me."

And he turns and leaves, not even checking to make sure she follows.

A hollow feeling starts spreading in Skye's stomach. This is more than just worrying about Simmons, she's sure of it; this is a dark night and Fitz trying desperately to reach her, struggling with words, hanging out of a car window and pleading. This is seeing Ward in her passenger seat, and watching her race off while he and Coulson are left to dodge a hail of bullets.

She wonders if there are any words that can make it okay.

She follows him back to his new workspace, a mini-lab situated off the garage. He has something complicated set up on the counters, and Skye recognizes most of it from her research into earthquakes; there are sensors springs, capacitors and accelographs Mack is sitting on a stool and adjusting the settings of a geophone. His hands still when she enters.

"You here for the show?" she asks uncomfortably.

"Just assisting," Mack says. He sounds very normal and non-possessed, but he's looking at her in an odd, flat way that raises the hair on the back of her neck.

"Here," Fitz says. He stomps on an X taped to the floor. "If you can just stand here."

Skye steps on her mark and finds herself looking into a giant cone-shaped thing glowing with an eerie blue light. "This isn't your usual seismometer," she remarks, feeling just the tiniest twinge of unease, because she thought she knew what was coming and now she doesn't. Will she really be able to control herself? The lab is cool and steel and colorless, and it couldn't be further from sand and sunshine.

No one responds to her comment. She looks over and sees Mack still watching her, Fitz touching things on his tablet and ignoring her completely.

The silence grows heavy and awkward.

"I'm sorry about Ward," she says finally, when she can't take it anymore. Then she remembers who she's talking to and wants to kick herself, because now Fitz is going to jerk or drop the tablet with his bad hand; it's happened before, when he gets startled, and he hates it because it makes him feel clumsy and stupid, and Skye used to take great pains not to surprise him in the lab -

"I need you to use your powers in this direction," Fitz says, nodding towards the cone. The tablet stays firmly in his hand. "I don't know if you have that much control over your abilities. But do your best. In that direction."

"Fitz," she says, imploring.

"I need to get accurate readings of frequency," Fitz continues, "and amplitude, and - and other things."

"Fitz, please talk to me," she begs, not even caring that Mack is witnessing everything from ten feet away. "Yell at me. Call me a dirty rotten traitor. It's okay. Just say something."

"We'll begin when I say go," Fitz says, and flips a switch that makes the cone start humming.

Skye hovers for a second, uncertain, and then she steps off the mark. "We're not doing this until you tell me how you really feel," she says.

Mack stands up. "He doesn't have to talk to you if he doesn't want to," he says, and suddenly the atmosphere is charged in a way that it wasn't before, with Skye unconsciously widening her stance and Mack mirroring it - deliberately? on instinct? - while Fitz stands between them. There are vibrations in the air, kinetic energy about to spill over.

"This isn't your business," she tells him, trying not to sound confrontational but needing to make herself clear anyway.

"Fitz's business is my business."

"I'm not going to hurt you," she tells Fitz directly, which is the wrong road to take, because an expression comes over his face that's one part annoyance and three parts defiance.

"I'm not afraid of you," he says. "I'm angry with you. There's a difference."

Skye lets out a breath. Mack is still towering in front of her with vibrations like a rubber band about to spring, but she knows - hopes - he won't do anything, not if she stays cool. "Okay," she says. "Okay. You're pissed because I was with Ward - "

Fitz slams his tablet on the countertop. It makes a loud, harsh sound that echoes through the lab. "You know what?" he asks Skye, who tries not to look as wide-eyed as she feels. "I - I am a little upset. That you would run off with _him_. The man who ruined my life. I can't even think about him without remembering the way the water rushed in - more than fifty pounds of pressure per square inch - do you even know what that's like?" He holds up both arms, palms out, in an elaborate shrug. "Or do you only care about romance?"

Shame twists deep in her belly. "It wasn't like that," she tries. "He was helping me, Fitz, that's all. He was helping me try to figure out my powers."

"I would've done that!" Fitz yells.

"You don't understand - " she starts to say, but his expression twists.

" _I don't understand_?" he asks. "What don't I understand? I don't understand what it's like to wake up one morning and be different?" He holds up his hand, his bad hand. "I don't understand what it's like to - to come back and have to face - to have everyone _look_ at you," he says the word with loathing, "forming opinions, deciding whether or not you're still good enough to be here - "

Skye feels like he's taken out her guts and laid them bare on the lab table. "I - I hadn't realized - "

"Because you _left!_ " Fitz says, and now his face is flushed, and tears are glistening in his eyes. "We spent days tracking you down, Skye. _Days_ of not knowing if you were dead or alive. And then you call Coulson and you just quit SHIELD without so much as a word to the rest of us, and I - I - I - I - "

"Easy, Turbo," Mack says, putting a hand on his shoulder, still staring at Skye in that hard way.

Fitz lets it stay there, but he looks even more agonized. "I'm a burden," he says. "I'm a burden to everyone, but they still help me, because that's... that's what a team does. That's what we would have done for you."

"I know," Skye whispers. "I know you would've. But I couldn't let you, Fitz. That was the point. My powers - I've _killed_ people with them - "

"I would've helped you anyway," Fitz insists, brave stubborn Fitz in his soft sweater, the boy who hung from a car window trying to reach her, the man looking at her with heartbreak in his eyes. "We're friends. I would've helped you."

If there's an inch of her that doesn't hurt, Skye doesn't know where it is. "I'm sorry," she says, ridiculously, inadequately. "Fitz, I'm _so_ sorry."

"Tell it to Ward," Fitz says, and turns back to the machine, doing something busy and pointed. Skye wishes she knew how to fix this, but she doesn't, so she can only watch the back of his rigid shoulders as he works, the chasm between them so unbreachable that it might as well have come from an earthquake after all.

*

"He refused to make eye contact the rest of the morning," Skye says, slumping into her seat. "It was like I was a leper. Or an annoying cousin. He didn't want anything to do with me."

Bobbi looks sympathetic. "He just needs time," she says. "He lost you, and then he lost Simmons. He's reeling."

"You didn't see his face."

"I didn't have to," Bobbi counters. "I know how much he cares about you." She nods to May as the other woman files into the hall with Coulson. "Did you know he built that seismometer himself?" she adds. "Modified some old SSR tech. Did it as soon as we heard about your powers."

That just makes her feel worse.

Bobbi leans over and tugs the end of her braid, sharply, causing her to squawk. "He'll come around," she promises. "It may not seem like it now, but he will. We'll get Simmons back, and then things will be normal again, and he'll forget all about you and Agent Ward spending romantic nights in exotic hotels - "

" _Ugh_ ," Skye says.

"And Mack will look after him until then," Bobbi says, and her voice only sounds a little sad. Skye looks at her out of the corner of her eye.

"He seemed okay today," she ventures. "Like, surprisingly non-traumatized."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Skye says, deciding not to explain that he was too angry to be traumatized. The entire morning was a disaster. They'd brought in two oranges and a peach from the mess hall, and between Mack's judgmental gaze and Fitz's stony silences, Skye had been way too tense to use her powers. They'd been _there_ , but that was the problem. Every time she called on them they reacted eagerly, unstably. She couldn't reach her zen place, not even thinking of code. So the minutes ticked by and her audience just stared at her and waited for her to do something.

It had been humiliating, in a weird way; all this drama about her powers, the dangers of them, and in the end it had been for nothing. Fitz didn't get a single reading.

"So that's something," Skye says, as Hunter waltzes into the room. He tips an imaginary hat to her. Fitz and Mack come in behind him, and they don't acknowledge her at all.

"Is everyone here?" Coulson asks the room. "Good. Let's get started."

He clicks the remote in his hand, and Simmons' face appears on the holographic projector. Skye ignores the twinge of heartache that accompanies it.

"This is the last image we have of Simmons," Coulson explains. "Skye pulled it from an airport parking lot near Anasco. We know it takes place after the stabbing because of the blood here - " He zooms in to show Simmons' shirt, and was that really necessary? Skye shifts in her seat. "But there are no signs of the dagger, and more importantly, no signs of anything else either. No weapons. No comms. No tech."

He clicks the remote again, and this time he pulls up a map of Italy. "The flight she took was scheduled to land in Venice, but here's the important part. There was no record of it with the airline. We only know it existed because we called and confirmed it. The flight left Anasco and landed in Venice, but according to the paperwork, the flight never happened."

He clicks the remote a final time. This screen shows files, codes, scripts. "Skye's had a look at the software and confirmed that it was a hacking job."

"A good one," Skye adds.

"So Simmons leaves in the middle of the night," Coulson says, "and then attacks a member of her team and boards a plane that no one is supposed to know about. What does this tell us?"

Silence.

"No, really," Coulson says to the assembly. "What does this tell us? Cause I got nothin'."

"She had help," comes a familiar voice from the back of the room.

Seven agents whirl around as one. Six different guns are drawn, cocked, and aimed.

Ward strolls into the room with an easy, casual air, like he isn't facing several Sig Sauers and a collection of Barrettas. His eyes seek out Skye first, and she feels her breath hitch in her chest without any kind of approval from the rest of her brain. _He's alive. He's alive. He's okay._ She hadn't realized how much fear and tension and worry she'd been carrying around until they all melt away at once, leaving her almost light-headed with it.

Her next emotion is fury.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she asks. The nerve of this asshole is _astounding_.

"I have a better question," Coulson says. "How the hell did you find this base?"

"I looked at a map," Ward says.

"That's cute. Isn't that cute, May?" Coulson says to her, and she steps forward, gun trained right between his eyes. Skye's heart is beating fast and furious against her ribs.

"I was being serious, actually," Ward says, acting for all the world like he's just chatting with colleagues. "I counted the miles when I was being transported to my brother. Then I looked at a map and sketched out a potential geographical radius based on speed and distance. From there I just had to find large, out-of-the-way buildings using arc reactor technology for primary power. You really should've considered that," he adds, "when you were choosing your headquarters. Sir."

Coulson doesn't rise to the bait, though the lines of his face deepen with anger. "So to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?" he asks.

"Thought I'd lend my expertise on being a fugitive," Ward replies. He gestures at the screen, and the movement causes everyone to swell towards him a step, their barrels all pointing at various vital parts of his body. He holds up his hands in surrender. "Easy," he says. "I'm just pointing out the obvious here."

"Which is what, exactly?" Skye asks. Ward looks at her again. She's the only one who hasn't drawn a gun.

"Simmons had help," he says. "But we aren't supposed to know that. We're supposed to think she just left her lab in the middle of the night and decided to stab you. It's random and senseless and stupid, and we're supposed to be so torn up over the whys that we don't even question the hows."

"Sir, are we seriously listening to this?" Mack asks. Skye has never actually seen him holding a weapon before, and it looks like a toy in his hands, a little piece of metal that's almost lost amid the bulk of his arms and shoulders. She feels a stab of panic. If this comes to blows, and Ward is in the middle -

"No," Coulson says, and for a second Skye thinks he's responding to her thoughts, but then she realizes he's answering Mack's question. "Former Agent Ward," Coulson says, tucking his gun into his pants, "you're being detained for crimes against SHIELD, against civilians, against - you know what, I'm not sure there's anyone out there you _haven't_ screwed over. Let's go. We can work out the paperwork later, after we've assessed - "

"Wait," Fitz says.

He lowers his weapon. Everyone looks at him in surprise. He's staring at Ward with a mix of anger and uncertainty, but underneath it all, Skye can see resolve, too.

"What do you know about Simmons?" he asks.

Something complicated passes over Ward's face as he gazes at Fitz. "I'm just guessing," he says. "But it makes sense for her to be answering to someone. How did she find Skye? How did she pay for a flight without money? Someone has to be feeding her intel and erasing her tracks afterwards - "

"And we aren't supposed to know about it, because we aren't supposed to suspect that she launched a planned, intelligent attack," Skye finishes. Her head is spinning, but she can see the framework of everything in her mind, the pieces of the puzzle coming together. "We're supposed to think she's crazy. Or controlled."

"Did she _act_ controlled?" Bobbi asks her.

Skye thinks of the dagger being slammed into her chest. She thinks of the brutal force that tore it back out, her muscle and tissue ripping to shreds as Simmons treated her like a piece of meat to be butchered. "Without a doubt," she says.

"So someone has Agent Simmons on strings?" Hunter asks, looking back and forth between everyone.

"Or maybe she's just working with _him_ ," Mack says, with his gun unwaveringly on Ward. Skye feels her eyebrows scrunching together in disbelief, and she isn't the only one. "Look, I don't want to believe she's HYDRA either," Mack says. "She's a nice kid. But facts are facts. She found you where you _just so happened_ to be staying with Agent Ward. When her assassination attempt failed, she _just so happened_ to vanish into thin air, and Agent Ward wasn't able to contain her."

Skye's never considered that, the possibility that Ward might have contained her. She turns back to him. "Did you guys fight?" she asks. Simmons has no combat training whatsoever, but if she took advantage of the element of surprise...

"She ran off," Ward says. "After she stabbed you."

"How convenient," Mack says.

"I'm telling the truth," Ward replies. "She came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. I could've chased her, sure. But that would've meant leaving Skye to bleed out. I made a call."

Skye believes him. Looking around her, however, she sees that most of the team doesn't, and the realization is startling. Ward's vibrations are steady and sure. They can't see them, of course, but surely they can hear the honesty in his voice.

And then there's the fact that he - that he cares about her. He wouldn't hurt her. He would want her, if she was bleeding out, to get help.

These things are so obvious that Skye can't believe the others don't get it.

"I say we put an ICER in him," May says, "and question him at length." Her gun is another that hasn't faltered the entire time.

"Agreed," Coulson says.

Skye's feelings are a complicated jumble, but she knows this isn't right, not if everyone is suspecting Ward of falsehoods when he's actually telling the truth. On the other hand, isn't this what she always wanted? Ward turning himself in? Taking responsibility for his crimes? She shifts from one foot to the other, catching the attention of both Coulson and Ward. The former looks grave. The latter has an expression she can't decipher.

"Did I mention I know who's controlling Simmons?" he asks, his eyes on Skye.

"What?" she demands. "Who is it?" She has everyone's attention now, and the force of it buzzes along her skin, their vibrations tense and suspicious and paranoid, all of them swirling around her like bees. She keeps her focus on Ward and lets everything else fade into the background.

"It's the guy," Ward tells her. "The eyeless guy. It has to be. He's been dreamwalking with you - "

Does everyone know this term? Is it in a SHIELD phrasebook?

" - and then Simmons knew where to find you once _he_ knew where to find you," Ward concludes. It makes sense, but there's at least one pressing problem that Skye sees right away.

"How are we supposed to know who the eyeless guy is?" she asks. All they have is her own sketchy description of him, and something tells Skye that he won't be in any criminal or international databases, not if he has the power to control people.

"Your father had a flash drive," Ward says.

"What?" Skye asks, startled.

" _What?_ " Coulson echoes.

"Who?" Hunter asks.

Ward keeps looking at her, talking directly to her. They could be in their own little world. "He told me about it when we were both undercover with Whitehall," he explains. "I think it might be connected to the special people - your people. Cal wanted it quite badly. Said it had been stolen from him. He ranted about it, actually," he says apologetically. "Said it didn't belong in Whitehall's hands and that he was going to retrieve it, keep it safe."

"Did he?" Skye asks. She feels light-headed again. "Retrieve it?"

"He didn't get the chance," Ward says. "But I did."

_Your friend took something he shouldn't have_ , the HYDRA agent had said, way back when they'd been at the motel. Skye remembers Kara, too, the way she'd disapproved, the way she'd said, _You must have a death wish_.

Did Ward risk his life to get that drive?

"That was stupid," Skye says. "You could've been killed. You don't even know what's on it."

"It was worth it," Ward says simply. He doesn't add _for you_ , but it hangs heavy and obvious in the air.

Skye crosses the room until she's right in front of him. She feels a shift in the vibrations behind her; without looking, she knows that everyone has tensed, that May's finger is curling around the trigger, that Bobbi and Hunter have both put themselves in the same ready stance. She would tell them to save their energy, but she knows how it would sound. _Save it for Ward. Romantic nights with Agent Ward._ She doesn't want anyone to doubt her loyalty, especially not now.

So she just holds out a hand. "If the files are about my people, I should be the one to look at them."

Ward smiles a little, like he's glad she came to that decision. "Is anyone gonna shoot me if I reach into my front pocket?" he asks.

"No," Skye says, at the same time May says, "Maybe."

Skye rolls her eyes and sticks her own hand in the pocket of Ward's jeans. He immediately stiffens, his vibrations leaping to attention, and she abruptly realizes how close they are, the closest they've been since the beach. The last time they did this, he smelled like salt and sand from the sea. She tries not to notice the warmth of his thigh through the denim, the careful way he's holding himself as her fingers wiggle around and find nothing.

"Other pocket," he says.

For some reason this makes her flush. "You could've said so before."

"Sorry," he says, not sounding sorry at all.

"Is this weird for anyone else?" Hunter asks the room at large.

Skye feels her face grow even hotter, and she roughly sticks her hand down Ward's other pocket, finding and extracting the drive before anyone else in the peanut gallery has a chance to chime in. She takes a big step back, too, putting some much-needed distance between them.

"If someone can get me a laptop, I'll have a look, see what kind of encryption we're dealing with," she says to everyone and no one in particular.

"Here," Bobbi says, and bless her, she doesn't comment on anything that just transpired. She just hands Skye a laptop, and Skye takes a seat and plugs in the drive.

"Let's go," Coulson says to Ward.

"What?" Skye asks, looking up from the screen.

"His old cell is still free," Coulson says, and Skye's powers rise so suddenly it makes her dizzy, her anger white-hot and burning. She doesn't want Ward in the cells. She doesn't know where the conviction came from or why she feels it so strongly, but it's there. She grips her knees under the table and tries to think logically. Maybe it's her own gut reaction to the thought of imprisonment? Maybe it's just her feelings for -

No.

Nope.

Not going there.

Skye watches Ward being escorted from the room. She doesn't stand up, or protest, or do anything else out of the ordinary. She just watches him go. At the very last moment, he turns his head and catches her eye, and something about his gaze is haunting; he doesn't look angry or upset, and he doesn't offer any resistance to being taken, but there's something there in his expression. Something in his eyes.

That's the image that sticks with her the rest of the afternoon, the curve of his jaw, the depth of his look.

She's still thinking about it when she finally cracks the encryption on the drive and sees a cascade of files bearing the name ENNILUX CORPORATION.


	10. Chapter 10

"So this is all depressingly familiar," Skye says.

Ward doesn't move, lying on the bed with his arms crossed behind his head. "Could be worse," he replies. "Whitehall's accommodations were pretty tragic."

Skye takes a seat in front of the cell boundary. Despite his flippancy, she can't help but feel that things _are_ worse, somehow; the last time they'd talked like this, she had been full of righteous rage, and seeing him look so pathetic had satisfied some sick twisted part of her that wanted him to suffer. Now she doesn't know what she's feeling, but the sight of him barefoot and stripped of everything but a gray prisoner uniform makes her heart whisper _wrong, wrong, this is wrong_.

"I got into the drive," she tells him, ignoring her treacherous feelings. "There's a lot of interesting stuff there."

"Yeah?"

"There's a group," she says, watching his face carefully. "It's called the Ennilux Corporation."

He doesn't bat an eye. Does the name mean nothing to him? Or is he fooling her yet again? His vibrations are no help, shifting restlessly like sand.

"As far as we can tell, they're a completely normal holdings company," she continues. "They pay their taxes. They donate to charity. But there has to be _something_ strange about them. You wanna know why?"

Ward still doesn't reply.

"The drive is an index," she says. "It has names, dates, pictures. People with blue skin. There's a guy with gills. And stuffed between all the crazy stuff are the quarterly reports of a corporation based in Venice." She lets that hang in the air for a moment. "Where Simmons is."

Ward continues staring at the ceiling. He could be made out of stone.

Skye walks over to the cell boundary and thumps the air with the file folder in her hand. It sizzles yellow and then fades again. "Well?" she asks. "What do you know about this?"

Ward finally sits up, bringing his feet to the floor and his hands to either side of his body on the bed. He meets her eyes directly, and she's surprised by the calmness and clarity she sees there. "Turn off the cameras," he says.

"What?"

"I have information," he says. "But it doesn't concern everyone watching on the second floor. Turn off the cameras and I'll tell you everything you want to know. But I won't do it for them. I'll only do it for you."

Two floors up, looks are being exchanged and jaws are being clenched; Skye would know this even without superpowers. She tries not to let it affect her. "You don't get to make the rules," she says. "The cameras stay on."

"Then the information stays with me."

"Is this really the stand you want to take?" she asks. "If you won't cooperate, we'll just leave you in this cell to rot."

"Like I said," Ward replies, "it could be worse." His vibrations are still restless, still caged, but they don't jump at all, not in the way that Skye has come to associate with panic or fear. She's struck by a sudden feeling of foolishness. Ward spent five years living on acorns and sleeping in the dirt. What exactly is a cell going to do to him that the wilderness didn't? And isolation - she could leave him down here forever and he would probably like it. He draws strength from solitude.

There's only one thing that gets to him, Skye knows. One thing that's ever come close to breaking him.

_I spent every minute in there worried about you. I took for granted that I'd always be around to protect you._

She could leave.

Leave, and refuse to see him, and have no one answer questions about where she is or what she's doing.

But if she denies Ward access to her, she also denies herself access to Ward.

"What if I don't mind that they hear?" Skye asks, even though she kinda does.

Ward looks at her in a way that says he isn't fooled. "You mind."

The sheer presumption of it makes her angry, especially since he's right; they _are_ watching on the second floor, and she needs to prove herself now more than ever. "You're a prisoner," she snaps, loud and clear. "You don't get to call the shots. You don't get to decide what's best for me. These choices aren't yours to make."

"No," Ward replies. "They're yours."

And he lays back down again, hands going behind his head, legs stretched out on the bunk like it's a five-star mattress.

*

"He's bluffing," Coulson says.

He, May and Skye are holed up in his office. Everyone else has been locked out on a need-to-know basis, which is an infuriating compartmentalization of information that Skye absolutely refuses to stand for, so she pretends she isn't aware of it.

"He doesn't know anything," Coulson continues, tapping a pen against his desk. "He just wants access to Skye."

"He could've looked at the drive before we did," May points out.

"So what?" Coulson asks. "We have it now. We have all the information he does."

"The intel might have more meaning to him if he really did have heart-to-hearts with Skye's father."

"If."

"If," May allows. She turns to Skye. "What do you think? Is he being honest?"

Skye's a bit taken aback at being deferred to as the Ward expert, so it takes her a moment to marshal her thoughts. "He couldn't have looked at the drive before I did," she says, slowly. "It had some high-quality encryption, and he's not that good with computers."

"Or he wants you to _think_ he's not that good with computers," May counters, and Skye almost laughs before she catches herself. She has a vivid memory of Ward, at the cottage, seeing her jury-rigged computer station for the first time, an expression of wariness on his face as he stared at the mess of cords like they were a pile of live cobras.

"He had trouble with the holotable," she says instead. "And the holotable is, like, toddler-level easy."

Coulson looks uncomfortable. "Let's get back on topic," he suggests.

Skye plucks a sheet of paper from the desk. "Look, this has everything we know about the eyeless guy, and it isn't a hell of a lot," she says. In fact, it's nothing more than his alias ("Reader"), his date of birth (03-03-71), and something called his date of _rebirth_ (09-13-83). Skye has a sneaking suspicion she knows what that means, but she isn't quite ready to share it yet.

"Do you think Ward saw his file?" May asks, and Skye shrugs.

"Even if he did, it's not like he's withholding vital information."

"So we're agreed," Coulson says. "We leave him down there and move forward without him."

Wait, what? Skye doesn't remember entering this agreement at all.

"What about Simmons?" May asks.

"Let's sleep on it," Coulson replies. "We can kick some of these files to other agents, see if any of the crazier ones look familiar. We need to be prepared... "

They're both standing, moving towards the door, tossing ideas back and forth, leaving her behind. Skye feels a flash of annoyance.

"I think we should go after Simmons right now," she says.

The two of them stop. Coulson's hand is already on the doorknob.

"We know she's in Venice," Skye says, looking back and forth between them. "We know she's there _right now_. But who knows how long she'll stay? The guy - Reader - he might be giving her new orders as we speak. If we wait to act on this intel, she could ghost before we even step foot in Italy. So why sit around?"

"It's not sitting," Coulson says. "It's preparing. Simmons is in the same place as Ennilux. This isn't a coincidence. We need to gather more information - "

"Then let's gather it!" Skye says, gesturing to the screen that shows Ward's cell. He's napping now, or at least his eyes are closed, and it feels so wrong to watch him sleep - to have his sleep _broadcasted_ like this to the entire room - that she hates herself for acknowledging the feed at all.

Coulson narrows his eyes. "Are you saying you want another shot at getting him to talk?"

"No," Skye says. "I mean, yes, but - " She runs a hand through her hair, frustrated. "It won't work. He isn't going to say anything. Not without getting something in return."

"So we're back to square one," Coulson says, conciliatory, and this really sets her on edge.

"I want to go and rescue Simmons," she says.

The silence in the room is deafening. May's features are like marble, smooth and impenetrable. Coulson removes his hand from the doorknob.

"Denied," he says.

" _Denied_?" Skye repeats.

"You heard me," Coulson says. He's wearing his Director Face, the one that books no argument, the one that makes him look every inch the highest authority of SHIELD. "We need to figure out what's going on before we rush headfirst into danger. We don't want a repeat of San Juan."

"So we're just abandoning Simmons to the whims of a creepy eyeless guy?" Skye asks.

"We're assessing a threat before we take action," Coulson corrects. "Now go talk to Fitz and see how he's faring with the weapons inventory. We need to know what kind of firepower we can assemble before we decide on any missions." When Skye doesn't move, his expression hardens just a fraction. "That's an order, Agent Skye."

_These aren't your decisions to make,_ she'd told Ward.

She hadn't realized she was being fucking prophetic.

*

She finds Fitz in his lab after a long and unsatisfying workout. He frowns when he takes in her sweaty clothes and scowl. Skye knows she isn't his favorite person right now, but he's just gonna have to deal with it, because she's still feeling angry and belligerent and - betrayed. That's it; she's feeling betrayed. She'd heard Coulson's voice in her head with every blow to the punching bag: _Denied. Denied. Denied._

"The boss wants to know what the arsenal looks like," she says.

"I'm still working on it," Fitz replies.

"Great," Skye says, and turns right around the way she came. Maybe she'll ask Bobbi to spar. She still feels peeved, almost more peeved that the situation warrants, but with Simmons gone and Ward in the cells and Mack hating her guts and Coulson pretty much grounding her like a recalcitrant child -

"Skye?" Fitz asks. She looks over her shoulder. His eyes are mostly hidden by his science visor thing, but he's fiddling with something on the counter, a nervous habit. "I was just looking into our dendrotoxin formula. The stuff we use in ICERs."

"Okay?" she asks, a little aggressively.

"There isn't going to be enough," Fitz says.

She turns around completely. "Enough for... ?"

"However we resolve this. A rescue mission, a strike against Ennilux, whatever - whatever we decide to do. There isn't going to be enough of the formula for everyone to have an ICER. It uses controlled substances, and those - they aren't - SHIELD doesn't access to them the way we used to." The apprehension on his face cuts deeper than a knife. "When we go after Simmons, some people will have real bullets."

Skye stands rooted to the spot.

And then a single thought comes to her, stronger than anything she's ever felt before, a certainty that sweeps through her entire body.

_No._

"We can't let that happen," she says.

"I'm not fond of the idea myself," Fitz replies.

"Have you told Coulson yet? About the shortage?" she asks, and Fitz shakes his head. "Good. Good. We can't wait."

"Wait for what?" Fitz asks.

Skye hesitates, but just like the rest of this awful situation, just like everything in her life for the past few months, there really isn't a debate to be had. There's right and there's wrong, and as much as Skye lives in the gray areas now - as much as certain things have _forced_ her to live in the gray areas - a few fundamental truths are becoming clear to her.

You don't leave people behind. That'd been her mistake, when she left SHIELD; she'd thought she was protecting them, but really she'd just been running. She shouldn't have done it.

She isn't going to do it again.

"Fitz," she says, curling her fingers into a fist. "How much do you want to help Simmons?"

*

"Nice place," Ward says, several hours later.

Skye closes the door behind her, files in one hand and chair in the other. Her stomach is in knots, but that isn't the image she wants to project, so she drops the chair to the floor with a loud and decisive _thud_. "I'll do the talking here," she says.

Ward raises his hands slightly, a mocking gesture. He can't move them very far since they're chained to the center of the table. The old WWII interrogation rooms aren't like the ones on the Bus - they're much dirtier, and they stood empty and dusty for years, water damage spreading across the ceiling while nests grew in the corners - but she'd managed to convince Coulson they were the best place to talk to Ward.

There aren't any cameras in such antiqued rooms.

"You said you'd talk if no one else was listening," she tells Ward, taking a seat. "Well, we're alone. So talk."

"How are you?" Ward asks.

Skye gives him a look.

"It's a serious question," he says, his eyes skimming briefly downward, where she'd been stabbed. Skye is hit with the sudden mental image of Ward kneeling over her body, his expression frightened, his hands pressing against the wound to staunch the bleeding. She doesn't know if it's a real memory or just something her brain conjured up because she knows him so well.

"I'm fine," she replies. "You?"

Ward looks stunned by the question.

Skye lays her folder on the table. "Let's get real," she says. "We're both in a position to help each other out, and I see no reason why we can't come to some kind of arrangement. I've already put you in a room without surveillance. I can do other things too. Things that will make your stay in the vaults a lot more comfortable. I can give you back some of the privileges you lost when you went all hara-kiri." She nods to the faint scar at the top of his hairline. "All you have to do is tell me what you know."

Ward opens his mouth, his brow furrowed -

\- and she curls her finger very slightly and points to her chest.

He pauses. They maintain eye contact for several seconds. Vibrations are poised in the air and ready to explode, because all he has to do is say one wrong thing. One pissed-off comment. One revealing question to get revenge for his imprisonment.

Instead, he slouches in his seat, the picture of arrogance. "What do _you_ know?" he asks.

Skye doesn't breathe out in relief, because Coulson and May will hear it. But her hands might be a little unsteady as she opens her file and starts fanning six sheets of paper in front of him. "I know my father was keeping tabs on special people," she says. "I know the eyeless guy is one of them, and his name is Reader. I know it all seems to tie back to the Ennilux Corporation, a completely legitimate company based in Venice. So what am I missing here?" She leans back, returning some of his arrogance. "What aren't you telling me?"

Ward smirks, a cocky thing that brings smugness to his voice. "What will I get if I share my intel?"

"What do you want?" she asks coldly.

The smile widens. "What are you offering?"

"Cut the crap," she says, though her heart is soaring. She should've known she and Ward could operate on the same page. "Do you know where Simmons or not?"

"How about a question for a question?" Ward asks, which stumps her briefly, but then she decides what the hell. It'll help her make a decision.

"Okay," she says. "I'll go first. What do you know about Simmons?"

Ward spreads his hands, the chains clinking a little. "Nothing," he says. "Just what I've already told you. She came to the safehouse, she stabbed you, I took you to the hospital. I have no idea where she went after that. I had no idea she was going to be there in the first place." His vibrations, quiet and still, confirm his words as the truth. "Why are you doing this?"

_Careful. Careful._

"I want to find Simmons," she says. "I'm willing to do whatever it takes."

He stares at her with dark brown eyes. She doesn't look away.

"What did my father tell you about the drive?" she asks.

"That it contained information of importance. He didn't go into details, and he never said how Whitehall got his hands on it. He was furious, though. Desperate to get it back. It clearly meant something to him."

"I was on it," Skye confesses.

This gets Ward's attention. "You were?"

"Yeah," Skye says, who looked at a file for Daisy Johnson, birth date 04-01-89, and felt absolutely nothing. Was she supposed to feel something? There was no picture, but it would've been of a baby anyway, so it didn't matter. More interesting to Skye was the word after rebirth: PENDING.

"How much do you know about the special people?" Ward asks. "Your people?"

"My mother was one." There'd been a picture that time. Jiaying. She'd been very pretty, and her dates came in threes: birth, rebirth, death.

Ward's voice is soft and compassionate. "Did you learn anything about her?"

"It's my turn," Skye reminds him, and with no actual thought for the words coming out of her mouth, she hears herself asking, "Why did you leave me at the hospital?"

Ward looks surprised. "I saw May," he says, like it's self-explanatory, and maybe it is. Their last meeting had involved her nailing his foot to the floor with a nail gun. "Besides, I saw you were healing. I knew you'd be all right even if they took you back into custody."

"So there's a part of you that still trusts SHIELD," Skye says.

Ward is silent for a long time, long enough that she wonders if he's going to answer. The wire is an itch under her clothes. Up in his office, Coulson and May are probably wondering what the hell she's doing. Why does it matter if Ward trusts them? But it matters. It matters to Skye.

"Yes," Ward says eventually. That's it. Nothing else.

Skye rubs her hands on her knees. "She didn't age," she says. "My mother. Or she did so very slowly. If she'd lived - " It's suddenly hard to speak. "If she'd lived, she'd probably look the same as her picture right now. We might've passed for sisters. We have some of the same features."

Ward reaches out a hand. It's stopped by the chains, so he lays it flat on the table, an invitation. She doesn't take it, but she looks at it.

"Why did you think I'd left you?" he asks. "After I told you I wouldn't?"

Skye looks to the heavens for strength. "You're a traitor," she says. "I shouldn't believe a word out of your mouth."

"But you do," Ward says.

He looks almost happy about it, satisfaction on his features like he's accomplished something great, and Skye resents it, she really does. "Did you genuinely try to kill yourself?" she asks. "Were those serious suicide attempts?"

Ward doesn't flinch. "Yes," he says. "Why do you follow Coulson?"

Skye glares at him - Coulson is _listening_ \- but he doesn't retract the question. He just looks at her steadily, patiently, the little scar on his hairline showing up in stark relief under the florescent light.

Fine.

"I believe in him," she says.

Ward doesn't make a sound, nothing that can be picked up by the wire, but he tilts his head very slightly to the side.

"I think he's a good person," Skye qualifies. "I think - I think he always tries to do the right thing. Even when it's hard." She's seen him before, staring at the files of agents he'd sent on dangerous missions, never relaxing fully until he gets the report, sometimes late in the night, that they made it back safely. Unexpectedly, a lump rises in her throat. "He looks out for me," she says, the words coming more freely now. "He looks after all of us. And he values me. He knows what I can do, and he lets me do it. It feels good to work with him," she adds, stronger now, more confident. "It feels like we're doing something good."

Ward accepts her answer with a nod. It's her turn again, and she knows what the script should say.

_Why did you follow Garrett?_

But she knows. She knows why. She was thinking about it even as she articulated her own feelings about Coulson.

Garrett looked out for him. Manipulatively, sure, and with his own agenda, but maybe sixteen-year-old Ward didn't know that. Sixteen-year-old Skye wouldn't have. And Garrett had valued him - hell, he'd made Ward his second, his lieutenant. He'd given Ward football dummies and let him demolish them with the full force of his rage. He didn't tell Ward to hide or be ashamed of what he was. He accepted him.

Just like Coulson accepted her, earthquakes and dead cops and all.

Skye is under no illusions about the nature of her loyalty to Coulson. She would kill anyone he asked her to. She _has_ killed people he asked her to. Because she trusts him.

People do that with their mentors.

"Do you ever wonder what kind of person you'd be if you hadn't met Garrett?" she asks.

A sort of shiver comes over Ward's face, there and gone in a flash. "Sometimes," he says, short, clipped. "Do you ever wonder what kind of person you'd be if you hadn't met Coulson?"

"All the time," Skye says.

She wonders what Coulson and May are thinking about this conversation. She wonders if it will be apology enough when they're looking back on this moment. Then she wonders if she's already made her decision after all.

"What do you really think of SHIELD?" she asks, deciding to lay it all on the table. If they're seriously going to do this, she needs to know.

Ward shrugs. "It's complicated."

Skye raises an eyebrow. _You can do better than that._

He grimaces and tries to rub his hand over his chin, but the chains prevent him, clinking softly. "It has good intentions," he says. "I can see that. I can even respect it. I just don't... " He pauses, searching for words. "I don't see the point," he says at length. "SHIELD's done. It never even existed in the first place. Coulson is fighting a war that can't be won. He's wasting our time - your time - chasing shadows that are always going to be there, trying to change a world that doesn't want to be changed." The chains rattle again, insistently. "There isn't any _point_ to it, Skye," Ward repeats. "Even with Coulson at the helm, things will go south sooner or later. Something will happen. Hypocrisy. Compromise. The other shoe will drop, and all those good intentions will mean nothing. And then where will you be?"

Skye feels her heart thumping painfully in her chest. "What if the world doesn't work like that?" she asks.

"Is that your question?"

"Yes."

"The world always works like that," Ward answers.

_Strings and strings_ , Skye thinks, but she doesn't know who's holding this particular marionette. It might be Garrett or Christian or even someone before that. So she tries another tactic. "You can't actually be this cynical," she says. "You were loyal to Garrett. You had faith in _him_. And you're - "

_You're in love with me_ , she just barely stops herself from saying. The others are still listening.

Ward hears her anyway. "I do believe in some things," he says, with a voice gone quiet. "I'm just selective about them. They have to be... special."

Skye looks down at her files. "One more question," she says, not seeing any of them, names and faces blurring together before her. "And this isn't an exchange. You don't get to ask anything back. I just need you to be honest with me."

"Always," Ward says.

Skye takes a long breath. "Tipping the scales," she says, referring to a conversation a million years ago, knowing he'll remember it anyway. "Was it true?"

His answer comes immediately. "It was true."

"Really?" Skye asks. "Because if nothing matters and everything good will eventually be compromised anyway, why do you even bother? Why do you care about the scales? Why does some part of you still believe in SHIELD?"

"Because you're here," Ward says. "You're SHIELD."

Skye feels like someone has driven a fist into her stomach and expelled all the air. Ward smiles a little at the expression on her face, but it isn't exactly happy. Rueful, maybe. "I'm sorry if that isn't a great answer," he says. "I wish I could say something more noble. I do want to change," he clarifies, with a quick look. "I want to do things differently in my life. I want to _be_ different. But it isn't going to happen by pretending I care about ideals that I don't." He shrugs. "It's just you, Skye."

And that does it. Finally, tortuously, with her heart in her throat, she's able to make her decision.

"This conversation is over," she says, climbing to her feet and gathering five sheets of paper. "Actually, you know what, Ward? _We're_ over." He looks startled - startled and dismayed - so she leans over the desk before he can say something incriminating. "There won't be any more trips," she says. "No more cottages. No more homemade chairs." She looks him right in the eye. "This is it."

Then she turns and leaves, letting the door swing shut with finality, wondering if she's making the biggest mistake of her life.

*

At 6:03pm, Skye exits the interrogation room.

At 6:04pm, the doors explode, showering the hall with sparks and chunks of sheet metal.

At 6:05pm, amid smoke, blaring alarms, and the convergence of every senior agent in the vicinity, three figures slip out of the base and into the darkness of the night.


	11. Chapter 11

"I hope one of you has a plan," Fitz says stiffly.

Skye meets Ward's eyes in the rear view mirror. His expression says _well?_ and hers says _I just busted your sorry ass out of prison. It's your turn_.

"Hello?" Fitz asks. "Does anyone know what we're doing? Because if not, we might have a little problem now that we've liberated a nationally-known fugitive from a secure holding facility using nothing but a sheet of paper and two nano-neodymium grenades hidden inside a chair."

Fitz, Skye has noticed, stumbles more over his words when he's pissed, and doesn't stumble at all when he's _pissed_.

"We'll figure something out?" she hazards.

"Oh, that's comforting."

"It could be worse."

"That's just inviting bad luck. That's just courting disaster, what you said right there."

"I have run from SHIELD before," she points out.

"I've run from SHIELD plenty of times," Ward offers from the backseat.

An uncomfortable silence descends in the car. When Skye looks over, she sees that Fitz has physically turned his body towards the window, his shoulders rigid, the street lamps casting long shadows over his tense, unhappy mouth.

His left hand twitches uncontrollably.

"We're gonna need transport to Italy," Skye says, after a few more miles.

"Any ideas?" Ward asks. His voice is casual, so he's either pretending not to notice the terrible silence or genuinely unbothered by it. Skye decides to run with it.

"Well," she says, "since Fitz couldn't steal us a quinjet - "

"Excuse me?" Fitz demands.

Skye puts on her most innocent expression, the one she used to flash at the nuns when they caught her smoking, drinking, coding, and generally doing a lot of other things that a nice young lady shouldn't. "I'm just saying, if we had a quinjet, it could have us out of the country in a matter of hours - "

" _I told you that!_ " Fitz says, outraged. "I told you that when we were planning the, the _great escape_ , but you said - and I quote - 'Fitz, we don't have time for subtle' - "

"Hang on," Skye says, abruptly unamused, "my voice isn't that nasally - "

"'Let's just do a smash and grab,'" Fitz continues, his mimicking completely awful, something that makes her sound like a Scottish chipmunk with a head cold, "and then I said 'why can't we wait until morning,' and you said 'Ward is the priority right now' - '

Skye feels a flush creeping up her neck, and she avoids looking towards the backseat.

"So _then_ ," Fitz says, gesturing wildly, " _then_ I pull off the _impossible_ , and right under the nose of _the director of SHIELD_ , and you're just going to sit there with your squishy cherub cheeks and say _Fitz couldn't steal us a quinjet_ \- "

"Quinjets have trackers," Ward interrupts, as Skye looks into the mirror with horror, staring at her cheeks. "They would've been able to follow us."

"Yes, thank you, Agent Ward," Fitz says, the sarcasm thick and heavy, "it's not like I invented that technology - "

"I'm just saying, you would've had to disable the OBD port - "

"Which I am perfectly capable of doing - "

"Not under that kind of time crunch!"

"In the time it took you to clear the corridor, I could've disabled the OBD, juiced the IS receptors, _and had time to get snacks!_ "

"Oh, I see," Ward says, looking to the heavens for guidance. "That's what this is really about, isn't it. The snacks."

"You're welcome," Fitz says pointedly. "For your jailbreak. For your _clothes_."

Ward looks at him in total disbelief, and despite everything, Skye is entertained. She'd honestly forgotten about a change of clothes, so if she and Ward had taken off on their own, he would've spent the entire time in a gray prisoner uniform. It was Fitz who had the foresight to pack a bag, to bring something out of his own closet that would fit a taller, broader man, and the result is Ward in sweatpants and a bright green t-shirt that says PARTICLE PHYSICS GIVES ME A HADRON.

"I kinda like it," she says.

"Of course you do," Ward says. "You're demented."

"Don't talk to her like that," Fitz snaps, turning his entire upper half to glare at Ward in the backseat.

Skye and Ward share a look of surprise, and then Ward says, soothingly, "I didn't mean - "

"I don't care what you meant. Don't talk to her like that."

"Okay," Ward says. "Okay."

The following silence is even worse than the one before. While Skye is extremely grateful that Fitz seems to be on her side again, it also puts her in an awkward place with Ward, because she can't defend him. She simply can't. What is she supposed to say? _It's okay. We're just joking around. He's so funny, that guy who gave you brain damage._

On the other hand, it's going to be a long, long trip if she isn't allowed to talk to Ward. And it feels weirdly disloyal to _him_ to just sit around and let people believe the worst of his character. The motel, the safehouse, the beach - those things happened. He did good. He's still doing good.

Then again... brain damage.

When did her life become such a mess?

"Let's just take a commercial fight," she says. "Coulson knows we're headed to Venice anyway. It's not like we need to cover our tracks. We just have to get there before the rest of the team does."

"Fine," Fitz says.

"Works for me," Ward says.

"Great," Skye says under her breath, and tries not to think about ten-plus hours trapped on a plane with the Bitter Boys.

*

They stop for gas and snacks, and Skye composes a quick to-do list in her head. They'll need to switch cars soon. She'll need to hop on her laptop and secure three plane tickets. She'd also like to make sure there's no chatter - from SHIELD or local LEOs - about their escape. She's _pretty_ sure Coulson wouldn't involve the black-and-whites in what's essentially a family conflict, but there's still a warrant out there for Ward's arrest, and all Coulson has to do is tip off the cops to make their getaway a very short-lived one.

She tries not to think about what he must've looked like when he saw that corridor, when he realized what she'd done.

_You're a good agent, Skye. A good person._

She crosses her arms over her chest even though it's nice and warm in the early morning sun.

"Hey," Ward says, leaning against the car with her. "Everything okay?"

"Why wouldn't it be?" Skye asks, watching Fitz march into the store with stiff shoulders and a twitching hand, pretending not to know either of them.

Ward looks at their shadows for a minute. Their long forms are blending together on the sidewalk. "I've been meaning to ask you something," he says, and Skye's pulse picks up.

She's been waiting for this. She's surprised it took so long, actually. He must have a million questions about why she broke him out, about the things she said. The only problem is that she doesn't have any answers she's willing to share.

_We needed a specialist._

_I couldn't leave you down there._

_You were sleeping, and I noticed your eyelashes for the first time._

All true. All equally unspeakable.

"What do you want to know?" she asks, because apparently she's feeling dangerous, and maybe he'll say it, maybe _she'll_ say it, right here in the parking lot of Quick-O-Mart -

"Do you think green washes me out?" Ward asks.

For a second, she's sure she misheard him. And then a smile creeps onto her face, one that makes Ward purse his lips in that way he has when _he's_ trying not to smile, and the two of them stand there in front of the garish lights of a convenience store with her grinning like an idiot and him sticking out like a sore thumb in 3am video game clothes.

"Yeah," she says, feeling lighter than she has in months. "Sorry. You're really more of a winter."

"Good to know," Ward replies. The smile is _almost_ breaking free.

She leaves him like that, pushing herself off the car and heading into the store after Fitz, thinking that this trip might not be so bad after all.

She finds their engineer browsing the chips-and-peanuts aisle with all the intensity that he usually gives weapons and fiddly bits of tech. She slides up to him with her hands in her pockets. "Anything banana-flavored?" she asks.

Fitz raises his eyebrows. "Banana-flavored peanuts?"

"Or watermelon. I could really go for some watermelon."

"Americans," Fitz says, but it lacks the heat of everything else he's said this morning, and Skye looks at him with fondness. He may hate Ward, and maybe he still has conflicted feelings about her too, but he's here. That's what matters.

"I never thanked you," she says.

Fitz keeps his eyes on the snacks, but his vibrations go still.

"You took a big risk back there," she elaborates. "You could've said no. You could've gone to Coulson and blown the whole thing wide open."

"It's Simmons," Fitz mutters.

Simmons in the wind, Simmons waiting for them right now, maybe hoping they'll come, maybe having no idea that they're coming with real bullets. Skye swallows hard. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I know. But still. I'm pretty sure - no, scratch that, I'm _completely_ sure we wouldn't have been able to do it without you. So we owe you. Big time."

"We," Fitz echoes, with a flat note in his voice.

Skye bites her lip, a habit she thought she'd left behind years ago. "We," she says cautiously. "Me and Ward." She pauses. "Ward and me? Ward and I?"

"You and a Nazi," Fitz says.

Skye feels a deep tug of discontentment. She's hurled _Nazi_ at Ward more times than she can count, but honestly, she's done it so often that the word lost its bite a long time ago. It feels different - worse - coming from Fitz, especially when she knows that he believes it.

"He's not really a Nazi," she says, and Fitz gives her an incredulous look. "I mean, Nazi organization, sure. But he was never loyal to them. Just Garrett. I'm not saying it was okay," she says hastily, because Fitz's eyebrows have drawn completely together, "just that he wasn't exactly hailing Hitler or whatever..."

She lets her words trail off as Fitz continues looking at her like something on the bottom of his shoe.

"Right," she says. "Okay. Nevermind. I just wanted you to know that he isn't going to betray us or anything."

"Yeah, that would be strange and uncharted territory."

"He won't put us in danger," Skye insists, but Fitz just shakes his head, and she's at a loss for how to explain herself in a way that he would understand. She could tell him about the googly ideas and the tomato-less lunches, but what good would it do? She could talk about the sun rising on his face and sand in his hair. She'd only sound stupid and sentimental. It wouldn't even matter if she said to him outright: _He's in love with me. He wouldn't hurt me._

Fitz doesn't believe Ward is capable of love.

Skye knows this because she used to think the same.

In the end, she decides to hell with it; they'll be spending a lot of time together in the coming days, so Fitz will either warm to Ward or he won't. It's out of her hands. She won't pretend to dislike either of them for the sake of the other.

Decision made, she reaches for a bag of chips in his hand, and that's when the first bullet rips right through the logo.

In what feels like slow motion, Skye grabs Fitz by the collar and bodily throws him into the next aisle while the chips are still flying through the air. She hears him crash, hard, into the metal shelves, and she cringes. Screams erupt to their left - civilians in the store, fuck, _fuck_ \- and she can hear angry male voices barking orders.

The chips hit the floor. Everything speeds up again.

Another bullet is coming her way, so she dives behind a shelf, cardboard signs splintering above her. Terrified customers are pouring out of the front entrance, and this makes no sense; the gunmen aren't even paying attention to them, and they should be hostages...

Unless this isn't a robbery.

Unless the gunmen are a recovery team.

Her weapons are in the car. They might as well be miles away. She has no idea where Ward is, if they've already captured him.

Her powers whirr to life: DO YOU WANT TO ENGAGE? Y/N.

"Skye?" Fitz whispers, and she's aware that she's breathing raggedly, the coldness of the floor seeping up her knees and through her chest and into her heart. Other things are coming to her, too. She knows that there are four men, that they're all armed, that they're standing in pairs while staggered between the aisles. She doesn't even have to see them. Their vibrations mark them as easily as neon signs.

"I have three Mouse Holes in the car," Fitz says, voice low with anxiety. "If we can just get to them - "

"We don't need them," she says.

" _Entspannen!_ " bellows one of the agents " _Tief durchatmen!_ "

There's another burst of gunfire, the rattle of a machine gun. Fitz flinches. Skye doesn't.

"Do you speak German?" she asks.

"What? No - "

"I guess it doesn't matter," Skye says. "They aren't SHIELD."

Fitz looks startled. "They wouldn't - _we're_ SHIELD - "

"Ward isn't."

"Then let's leave him here!" Fitz says urgently. "Let's just go!"

Skye is looking into the store's overhead mirrors, something the other - agents? mercenaries? - apparently aren't trained to do. She sees them approaching their aisle, boots heavy, guns drawn. The vibrations of their footsteps send little shockwaves of energy through her body.

"You're gonna want to hold on to something," she says.

"What?" Fitz asks. "Why? What are you going to do?"

" _Befolgung!_ " shout the agents. " _Weißt du was das beste ist!_ "

"Just do it," Skye says.

Fitz heeds her advice, gripping the edge of a metal shelf with bloodless fingers. "We can leave," he says again, a last, desperate attempt. "We can just go. If they want Ward - "

Skye's breathing has slowed to a calm and steady rhythm.

"They can't have him," she says, and in the mirror, an agent's eyes raise to meet hers.

Things happen quickly after that.

The entire store starts to shake, the ground trembling, products falling off their hooks. The agents yell some more, but their tones are different now, panic threading through confused commands. One of them turns in a circle with his gun in the air like he's going to shoot the walls. One of them steps on a bag of gummy bears and the entire thing pops.

Skye focuses on him first.

 _Break_ , she thinks at his vibrations, and they snap at a dozen different points, the fault lines of his arms and legs suddenly in pieces. He falls with a bloodcurdling scream, and this hits her in a way she didn't expect, waves of sound and energy slamming into her like physical blows. She gasps and reels back.

The ground splits in two.

" _Rückzug! Rückzug!_ " an agent shouts, and Skye knows what a retreat sounds like, so she focuses on him next. She has to close her eyes to get a good picture of his vibrations. They're completely erratic - jumping, jerking, panic, pain, fear, movement - too much motion to control. She turns her attention to the ground instead, where vibrations are collecting in the cracks of the linoleum, and she thinks _more_.

The floor caves in, sending the agent tumbling down into darkness.

Skye is electrified, breathless with power, surrounded by thousands of vibrations that can all be directed by her will. They're so easy to command that she actually misses the third and fourth agents; she overshoots her mark, and they stumble but ultimately stay on their feet as they run for the doorway. She urges her powers to _go, go, go_ , and a crack in the ground chases them all the way to the store's entrance, nipping at their heels until it finally reaches them and they drop.

It's simple enough to kill them after that. Their beating hearts are just lines of code that she has to delete.

The earthquake is still raging, doors and windows rattling, but Skye isn't afraid. She doesn't know how she was ever afraid of this. She holds out a hand, palm down, and soothes the vibrations into stillness, wiping away their energy until nothing is left but - well, an impressive amount of carnage, really. The store is a mess. The ground is in chunks, and it's covered with food and garbage and debris.

Skye is idly wondering if she should pay for the damage when she hears a gun being cocked.

She turns, slowly, and sees the first agent propped up on the ground, his gun pointing at her with a broken finger curled painfully around the trigger. He smiles at her with blood on his teeth.

"You did this," he says.

"Yep," Skye says.

"I can see why he's so obsessed with you."

"Wait, what?" Skye asks, but then the man's head is blown back by a perfect sniper shot between the eyes.

"Hey!" Skye shouts, aggravated. She knew Ward had to be lurking somewhere nearby, but when a man makes cryptic comments with his dying breath, _it's important to get follow-up_. She turns in the direction of the shot, but the vibrations over there simply shrug. He's such an asshole.

Fitz emerges from the other aisle with shredded cardboard in his hair and a shell-shocked expression on his face. "You - " he says.

Skye looks him over. Her ponytail has come undone; she can feel the tendrils around her face, and she knows she probably looks disheveled and manic. Strangely, however, she feels calm. She isn't even out of breath. "It's okay," she says. "I'm all right."

"All _right_?" Fitz repeats. "You - you moved like - that's faster than anyone I've ever - and what you _did_ \- "

"Alien perks," she says, and Fitz continues to gape. "Look, I'm sorry. But they took shots at us. They were bad guys." And she blasted them away like a goddamn boss. And she controlled her powers the entire time; she had perfect control. Who struggles with a saggy watermelon now?

Fitz still looks a little stunned, so Skye decides to liberate the dead agents of their guns while he works it out. "Ward?" she calls, stripping a rifle from its sling. "Where are you?"

"Right here," Ward says, emerging through the front door. It takes her a second to realize that the entrance is situated at completely the wrong angle for the sniper shot. In the time she thinks _there's someone else here_ , she's registered another presence behind her, someone at her back, and she's turning with the rifle raised in a flat second.

"You're welcome," Kara says, with a barrel between her eyes.

*

"This really is quite disturbing," Fitz says sometime later.

Kara pops a peanut in her mouth. She doesn't show any signs of discomfort that Fitz is basically ogling her half-familiar, half-misshapen face with a mix of scientific curiosity and pure gross-out fascination. "I make do," she says.

"No, but really - the fact that you aren't _allowed_ to take it off - it must be some mix of holographic cell reproduction and neurolinguistic triggers - "

"Is anyone else gonna ask why she just showed up out of nowhere?" Skye interrupts. She dumps the final body in the pile, their black clothes a stark contrast to the bleached yellow grass of the field. "I'm grateful for the extraction and all," she tells Kara, "but the last time I saw you was a motel room where you were supposed to get medical supplies and come right back."

"I got caught up," Kara says.

Skye waits for more, but she doesn't elaborate. "Okay? Then what?"

"Then I found Ward."

Skye is in the middle of striking a match. She stops, and it dies between her fingers.

"It isn't what you think," Ward says quickly, sharing a glance with Kara, one full of unsaid words and unspoken communication. Skye feels her powers lurching in her stomach like a bad lunch. "I left the drive with her, Skye, because I thought I was dying. Remember? I'd just stolen it, but then I got injured. So I entrusted it to Kara. And she's kept it safe all this time."

"But you guys have been in contact," Skye says.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

Ward looks uncomfortable. "Since the safehouse."

The bad lunch is spreading. Secrets and lies; looks full of meaning; a shared history she knew nothing about. "So you were, what? Keeping your options open?" Sharing things with her in the sunlight, putting googly eyes on watermelons to make her smile, then running off to rendezvous with the woman wearing the face of his ex-lover...

"I was a back-up plan," Kara says. "In case things went south. Which they did." She gives Skye an assessing look. "You busted him out of SHIELD custody before I could, though."

The truth is right there in front of her. "You surrendered yourself knowing you'd get broken out," Skye says to Ward, and she doesn't know why she's feeling so disappointed all of a sudden, because she should've known. She should've fucking known. This is what Ward _does_. He makes her think one thing and then pulls the rug completely out from under her, always working another angle, never stopping his manipulations for a single second -

"Ah, there we go," Kara says. "There's the Agent Skye I remember."

Skye is very keenly aware that she's holding matches and that human beings are very flammable.

Ward takes a step forward and places one shoulder in front of Kara, a protective gesture. "HYDRA came for her," he says.

"Good," Skye says.

"That day at the motel," he explains. "She had the supplies for me and was making her way back. But then she got waylaid. They came in a team of four."

She isn't so angry that she can't see the implications of that. "Our gunmen today were HYDRA?"

"Without a doubt," Kara replies. "Did you hear them shouting _entspannen, entspannen_?" When Skye nods, she says, "Those are brainwashing triggers. They're trying to get me back as an asset."

"So they're just following you around and hoping you'll go back under?"

"Yes, they're hoping that," Kara says, with a grim little smile.

Ward looks sideways at Skye with an amused, almost proud expression, like _isn't she great?_ Fitz is glancing back and forth between all of them. "I'm sorry, this doesn't - I'm not - there isn't a lot of logic here. Whitehall is dead. He was the one to put you under. You _can't_ be brainwashed anymore by the triggers he used."

"They must've found a way around it, then," Kara says. "Because I'm pretty sure your friend has been brainwashed too."

They stand in thundering silence. Kara pops another peanut.

"Simmons isn't brainwashed," Skye says, at the same time Fitz asks, "Why do you think that?" and Ward demands, "How long have you been keeping this from me?"

"It's just something I've put together," Kara says. "But she disappeared out of the blue, right? No warning. No goodbyes. I bet you checked the security footage and saw nothing out of the ordinary; she probably put down her sandwich, or her tools, or whatever she was doing, and simply walked off base."

The hairs on Skye's neck begin to rise.

"That's standard operating procedure for HYDRA," Kara continues, giving a hostile look to the pile of dead Nazis on the ground. "They make a call, active a sleeper agent, and tell them not to raise suspicion for a day or two. Then, when no one is watching, they just... vanish. Leave and carry out their secondary orders. Most agencies assume they've gone rogue. They get killed by their own people as a preventative measure and HYDRA never has to lift a finger to protect its secrets."

Fitz looks like he might be sick. "We didn't check the security footage from the day before," he says. "She - she could've received a call - we wouldn't know - "

He looks at Skye, and the same thought is reflected on both their faces: _I wasn't there. I wasn't there. If I'd been there..._

"The question you have to ask yourself now," Kara says, "is who would want to control your friend."

"Reader," Ward says immediately. He's standing in his ready pose, face serious, arms crossed over his chest, looking ridiculous and incongruous in his bright green t-shirt. "Reader's in Venice. The Ennilux Corporation is in Venice. I bet he works for them, and they're - I don't know, an intelligence ageny? A criminal syndicate? But they have an interest in special people. And you're special, Skye."

Skye feels nauseous, dizzy. "We need to get to Venice," she says. "Like, _yesterday_."

"Did you hear what I just said?" Ward asks. "These people are trying to kill you. They're sending brainwashed assassins to kill you."

"Yeah, I got that."

"And you want to fly right into their headquarters?"

She looks at Fitz again. "It's Simmons," she says simply.

Not a single person in their little war council can argue that, and no one even tries to. Skye drops a match on the bodies and they all watch together as they go up in flames. Burning corpses is deeply unpleasant - there's a smell, and a certain way human flesh cracks open under extreme heat - but Skye watches them roast without even seeing them.

Simmons was brainwashed.

She was sent to kill her.

But _why?_

Skye tries hard not to think about being stabbed, because sometimes she does and things start rattling on countertops. The event mostly makes an appearance in her nightmares. Now she purposefully brings it to mind, remembering the dagger, the glint of it, the way Simmons sunk it so forcefully into her chest. There are easier ways to kill someone. Skye wasn't even on guard, wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary. They could've brainwashed Simmons to be a sniper. They could've had her sneak into the cottage late at night and put arsenic in the food.

So why a dagger? Why such a close and personal kill? Why does Reader want her dead in the first place?

Why, why, _why?_

"It's 11am," Ward says, as the bodies smolder into nothing. "We can still make an afternoon flight if we leave now."

"Where are we going?" Kara asks.

Skye is shaking her head before she finishes. "You can't come. We don't know you. It's too risky - "

"Okay, first, you don't tell me what to do," Kara snaps. "Second, has anyone else here been brainwashed? Does anyone else know the first thing about brainwashing? You're gonna need someone like me if you really want to help your friend." She flings her bag of peanuts into embers of the fire. "I'm coming."

Skye looks at Fitz. His face is pale, pinched, and worried. "We have to do whatever we can to help Simmons," he says.

She turns her gaze to Ward. He's wearing a very careful non-expression, the kind he puts on when he doesn't want her to know what he's thinking. "It's your call," he says.

Skye tosses the matchbook on the smoldering remains of the Nazis, and vibrations leap up to consume it. The energy of fire is almost as pretty as the energy of water.

"Let's go, then," she says, and turns and leads her army back to the car, to the mission, to the possibility of a future where they all confront an evil organization full of superpowered beings and then die gruesomely.

As they pick their way across the field, Kara says, "You know, this really would've been easier with a quinjet," and Fitz gives her the ugliest look that one human being has ever given another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're officially halfway done! Thanks to everyone reading and reviewing.
> 
> I forgot to mention something important in the last chapter, so let me correct it now: Ward's speech about the broken world was lifted almost directly from JT's speech about the broken world in Secret Warriors #14. If you don't already know, those are the comics where Daisy (aka Skye) is on a ragtag team headed by her mentor Fury (aka Coulson) while also having a romantic relationship with JT (aka Ward), a teammate who later betrays them to HYDRA but is really conflicted about it due to his feelings for Daisy. At the end of the series, Fury has JT dangling from a cliff and he reveals that he knew about JT's double-crossing all along. Then he asks, "Do you really love her?"
> 
> JT says "More than anything," and Fury drops him from the cliff and kills him.
> 
> So there's that.


End file.
